Expiration Date

I don’t claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere. I don’t claim anything because I don’t know anything about the subject; for that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.

—Thomas Alva Edison,

Scientific American,

October 30, 1920

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

“But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

KOOTIE woke up when a black man nudged his foot with a bristly push broom. The boy straightened up stiffly in the orange plastic chair and blinked around at the silent chrome banks of clothes dryers, and he realized that he and the black man were the only people in the laundromat now. Whenever he had blinked out of his fitful naps during the long night, there had been at least a couple of women with sleepy children wearily clanking the change machine and loading bright-colored clothing into the washing machines in the fluorescent white glare, but they had all gone home. The parking lot out beyond the window wall was gray with morning-light now, and apparently today’s customers had not yet marshaled their laundry.

“My mom will be back soon,” Kootie said automatically, “she had to go back home for the bedspreads.” He had said this many times during the night, when someone would shake him awake to ask him if he was okay, and they had always nodded and gone back to folding their clothes into their plastic baskets.

But it didn’t work this morning. “I should charge you rent,” said the black man gently. “Sun’s up, boy.”

Kootie slid down out of the seat and pulled his new sunglasses out of his jacket pocket. “Sorry, mister.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about some chalk drawings somebody did on the outside of the building, would you?”

Kootie put on the sunglasses before he looked up at the man. “No.”

The man stared at him for a moment, then crinkled his eyes in what might have been a smile. “Oh well. At least it wasn’t gang-marks from our Kompton Tray-Fifty-Seven Budlong Baby Dipshits or whoever they are today. And at least it was just chalk.”

Kootie’s head was stuffed and throbbing. “Are the chalk markings still there?”

“I hosed ’em off just now.” Again he gave Kootie the wry near-smile. “Figured I’d let you know.”

Kootie started to stretch, but he hitched and pulled his right arm back when the cut over his rib flared hotly in protest. “Okay, thanks.”

He limped across the white linoleum, around the wheeled hanger-carts, to the glass doors, and as soon as he had pushed them open and stepped outside, he missed the stale detergent-scented air of the laundromat, for the dawn breeze was chilly, and harsh with the damp old-coins smell of sticky trash-can bottoms.

A half-pint bottle of 151-proof Bacardi rum had cost him sixteen dollars yesterday afternoon—six for the bottle, and a ten-dollar fee for the woman who had gone in and bought it for him. By her gangly coltish figure Kootie had judged her to be only a few years older than himself, but her tanned face, under the lipstick and eyeliner and flatteringly acnelike sores, had been as seamed and lined as a patch of sunbaked mud. Edison had made Kootie tear the ten-dollar bill jaggedly into two pieces before giving one half of it to the woman prior to the purchase; he had laughingly said that this made her his indentured servant, but neither Kootie nor the woman had understood him. He had wordlessly given her the other half of the bill after she had delivered the bottle.

Edison had already had Kootie buy a roll of adhesive tape and a box each of butterfly bandages and “Sterile Non-Stick Pads,” and then in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight behind a hedge on a side street off Vermont, Edison had pulled up Kootie’s shirt to look at their wound, which had still been perceptibly leaking blood even though Kootie had been keeping his fist or his elbow pressed against it almost without a break since he had got away from the Southern California Edison truck half an hour earlier.

It was a V-shaped cut too big for him to be able to cover with his thumb, and Kootie had begun whimpering as soon as Edison started swabbing at it with a rum-soaked pad, so Edison had made Kootie swallow a mouthful of the rum. The taste was surprising—like what Kootie would have expected from film developer or antifreeze—but it did make his head seem to swell up and buzz, and it distracted him from the pain as Edison thoroughly cleaned the cut and then dried the edges, pulled them together, and fastened them shut with the I-shaped butterfly bandages.

Then, with a pad taped over the closed and cleaned cut, Edison had had a sip of the rum himself. When Kootie had floundered back over the hedge and started down the sidewalk, he had seemed to be walking on the deck of a boat, and Edison steered him into a taquería to eat some enchiladas and salsa and drink several cups of Coke. After that Kootie had been sober but sleepy, and they had found the laundromat, had furtively marked up the wall outside it, and finally had gone in to nap in one of the seats. The nap had continued, with interruptions, all night.

He shivered now in the morning breeze and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he must be sober, but the pavement still didn’t seem firmly moored.

He felt his mouth open involuntarily, and he wearily braced himself for forcing it shut against some crazy outburst, but Edison just used it to say, grumpily, “Where are we now?”

“Walking on Western,” said Kootie, quietly even though there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Looking for a bus to take us to a beach.”

“Final discorporation is on my agenda today, is that it? Why did we have to outside so early? It’s cold. It was warm back in that automat.”

Each spoken syllable was an effort, and Kootie wished Edison wouldn’t use so many of them. “They washed the chalk off the wall,” he said hoarsely. Cars were rumbling past at his left, and his voice wasn’t loud, but he knew hear him.

“Ah! Then you’re a clever lad, to have got away quickly.” Kootie’s mouth opened very wide then, so that the cold air got all the way in to his back teeth, and he was afraid Edison was going to bellow something that would be audible to early-morning workers who might already be in these shadowed tax offices and closed movie-rental shops—but it was just a jaw-creaking yawn. “I shouldn’t stay out here, in my excited state, like this. Compasses will be wagging. I’ll go back to sleep. Holler for me if you—mff!”

Kootie had stumbled on a high curb and fallen to his knees.

“What’s the matter?” said Edison too loudly. Kootie took the ending r sound and prolonged it into a groan that rose to a wail. “Don’t talk so much,” Kootie said despairingly. “I can’t breathe when you do.” He sniffed. “I bet we didn’t get one full or yelling at their kids or dropping baby bottles.” He tried to struggle back to his feet, and wound up resting his forehead on the sidewalk. “I can still taste those enchiladas,” he whispered to the faint trowel lines in the pavement “And the rum.”

“This won’t do,” came Edison’s voice out of Kootie’s raw throat Kootie’s arms and legs flexed and then acted in coordination, and he got his feet under himself and straightened all the way back up. Slanting morning sunlight lanced needles of reflected white glare off of car windshields into his watering eyes.

“You’re just not used to the catnap system,” said Edison kindly. “I can go for weeks on a couple of interrupted hours a night. You go to sleep, now—I’ll take the wheel for the next couple of miles.”

“Can we do that?” asked Kootie. He left his mouth loose for Edison’s reply, but had to closed had to close it when he felt himself starting to drool.

“Certainly. What you do is stand still for a moment here, and close your eyes—then in half a minute or so I’ll open your eyes but you’ll already have started to go to sleep, get it?” You’ll go ahead and relax and you won’t fall. I’ll hold us up, and walk and talk. Okay?” Kootie nodded. “Close your eyes, now, and relax.”

Kootie did, and he let himself fall away toward sleep, only peripherally aware of still being up in the air, and of the daylight when his eyes were eventually opened again. It was like falling asleep in a tree house over a busy street.

AND HIS confused memories and worries wandered outside the yard of his com I and began bickering among themselves, and assumed color and voices and became disjointed dreams.

His gray-haired father was at the front door of their Beverly Hills house, arguing with someone from the school district again. Sometimes Kootie’s parents would keen him home from school when science classes prompted him to ask difficult questions on topics like the actual properties of crystals and the literal meanings of words like energy and dimension.

“We’re saving it for the boy,” his father was saying angrily. “We’re not selfish here. In my youth I had the clear opportunity to become a nearly perfect jagadguru but I sacrificed that ambition, I unfitted myself by committing a theft, so that the boy could become the jagadguru perfectly, in psychic yin-and-yang twinhood with one who was the greatest of the unredeemed seers. The unredeemed one won’t be able to accompany our boy to godhood, but he will be able to achieve redemption for himself by serving as the boy’s guide through the astral regions. Right now the guide must wait—masked in the boy’s persona ikon, as he will eventually occupy a place in the boy’s persona. In order for the union to be seamless, it must occur after the boy has achieved puberty.”

Kootie had heard his father say much the same thing to his mother, on the nights Kootie had tiptoed back up the hall after his bedtime. It all had to do with the Dante statue, and the drunks and crazy people who wanted to talk to Don Tay.

His father waved ineffectually. “Clear off, or I’ll have no choice but to summon the police.”

But now Kootie could see the man standing grinning on the front doorstep, and it was the one-armed man with the tiny black unrecessed eyes.

Kootie flinched, and the dream shifted—he was lying in the back seat of a car, half asleep, rocking gently with the shock absorbers on the undulating highway and watching the door handle gleam in reflected oblique light when the occasional streetlamp swept past out in the darkness. He was relaxed, slumped in the tobacco-scented leather upholstery—this wasn’t Raffle’s Maverick, nor the old marooned Dodge Dart he had slept in on Wednesday night, nor the Fussels’ minivan. He was too warm and comfortable to shift around and look at the interior, but he didn’t have to. He knew it was a Model T Ford. The driver was definitely his father, though sometimes that was Jiddu Parganas and sometimes it was Thomas Edison.

Kootie smiled sleepily. He didn’t know where they were driving to, and he didn’t need to know.

But suddenly there was a screech of brakes, and Kootie was thrown forward into the back of the front seat—he hit it with his open palms and the toes of his sneakers.

THE DREAM impact jolted him out of sleep, and so he was awake when his palms and the toes of his sneakers hit the cinder-block wall an instant later; using the momentum of the leap he had found himself making, he flung one leg over the top of the wall, and before he boosted himself up and dropped into the dirt lot on the other side, he glanced behind him.

The glance made him scramble the rest of the way over the wall and land running, and he was across the lot and over a chain-link fence before he had taken and exhaled two fast breaths, and then he was pelting away down a palm-shaded alley, looking for some narrow L-turn that would put still more angles and distance between himself and the Western Avenue sidewalk.

A pickup truck had been pulled in to the curb, and five men in sleeveless white undershirts had hopped out of the bed of it to corner him; but what had driven the fatigue out of his muscles was a glimpse of the bag-thing one of the men was carrying.

It was a coarse burlap sack, flopping open at the top to show the clumps of hair it was stuffed with, and a battered Raiders baseball cap had been attached to the rim and was bobbing up and down as the man carrying it stepped up the curb; but the sack was rippling as if a wind were buffeting it, and harsh laughter was shouting out of the loose flaps. As Kootie had scrambled over the wall, the bag had called to him, “Tu sabes quien trae las Haves, Chavez!” and barked out another terrible laugh.

Kootie was beginning to limp now on his weak ankle, and his cut rib was aching hotly. He crossed a street of old houses and hurried down another alley, ceaselessly glancing over his shoulder and ready to duck behind one of the old parked cars if he glimpsed the bumper of a pickup truck rounding the corner.

“What was that?” he asked finally in a grating whisper, and even just forming the question squeezed tears of fright out of his eyes.

Even Edison’s voice was unsteady. “Local witch-boys,” he panted. “They tracked us with a compass, I’ve got to assume. I’m going to go under, clathrate, so they can’t track me. Holler if you need me—”

“But what was that?”

“Ahhh.” Kootie’s shoulders were raised and lowered. “They…got a ghost, captured one, and had it animate the trash in that bag, apparently. It’s got no legs, so it can’t run away…but…well, you heard it? I was afraid you did. It can talk. Cheerful thing, hmm?” The bravura tone of Edison’s last remark was hollow.

“It woke me up.”

“Yes, I felt you wake up in the instant before we hit the wall. It’s like hearing the tiny snap of a live switch opening, just before the collapsing electric field makes a big spark arc across the gap, isn’t it?”

“Just like that.”

Kootie was still walking quickly, and he could tell that it was himself placing one foot in front of the other now. ‘Where do I go now?” he asked, ashamed of the pleading note in his voice.

“God, boy—just walk straight away from here, fast. As soon as I’m under consciousness you should start looking for someplace to hide for a while—behind a hedge, or go upstairs in some office building, or hide in a boring section of the library.”

“Okay,” said Kootie, clenching his teeth and looking ahead to the next street. “Don’t hide too deep, okay?”

“I’ll be not even as far away as your nose.”

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

‘“Bring it here! Let me sup!’

It is easy to set such a dish on the table.

‘Take the dish-cover up!’

Ah, that is so hard that I fear I’m unable!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

SHERMAN Oaks sat shivering in the early-morning sunlight on a wall beside the parking lot of an A.M. P.M. minimart. His companions, two ragged middle-aged men who were passing back and forth a bottle of Night Train in a paper bag, were ghosts, old enough and solid enough to throw shadows and to contain fortified wine without obviously leaking. They were pointing at a skinny lady in shorts and high heels at the street corner, and laughing (“FM shoes, ‘fuck me’ shoes, hyuck-hyuck-hyuck”), but Oaks just clutched his elbows and shivered and stared down at the litter of paper cups and beer cans below his dangling feet.

He was starving. The four piece-a-shit ghosts he had inhaled yesterday were all the sustenance he had had for more than three days, and the Bony Express was a shrill chorus in his head and a seeping of blood from the corners of his fingernails.

He hadn’t slept last night. He hadn’t even been able to stop moving—walking along sidewalks, riding buses, climbing the ivied grades of freeway shoulders. During the course of the long night he had found his way to a couple of his secluded ghost traps, but though the creatures had been there, hovering bewilderedly around the palindromes and the jigsaw-puzzle pieces, he hadn’t been able to sniff them all the way up into his head; they had gone in through his nostrils smoothly enough, but just bumped around inside his lungs until he had to exhale, and then they were back out on the dirt again, stupidly demanding to know what had happened. He had even inhaled over one of the antismoke crowd’s L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL ashtrays in an all-night doughnut shop, and got nothing but ashes up his nose.

He was jammed up.

The “big ghost” that had been shining over the magical landscape of Los Angeles for the past four days had been the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. It had been Edison's face on the collapsed ectoplasm figure at the Music Center, the day before yesterday. And now Edison had (again!) fed Oaks a rotted ghost—and it had jammed him up, and he was starving.

Oaks looked up at the sky, and he remembered mornings when he had snorted his fill the night before, and had had more unopened vials ready to hand. I’d like it always to be six o’clock on a summer morning, he thought, and I’m in a sleeping bag on some inaccessible balcony or behind a remote hedge, and my feet are warm but my arms and head are out in the cool breeze and I’m sweating with a sort of disattached, unspecific worry, and I’ve got hours yet to just lie there and listen to the traffic and the parrots flying past overhead.

The police would be after him. He had run away from that confusion in Inglewood yesterday afternoon, but his shots had probably hit both of the cops in that patrol car, and his fingerprints were all over the inside of the SCE truck, and the van in the back of it. And the police probably still had his fingerprints on file; he now remembered that he had held several custodial jobs in hospitals, during the fifties and sixties, catching fresh death-ghosts and lots of the tasty, elusive birth-ghosts.

He’d have to get rid of the revolver—a “ballistics team” would be able to tell that it was the weapon that had fired on the police car. Oaks should have no trouble finding some street person who would take it in trade for some other (certainly less desirable) sort of gun.

But the police, unfortunately, weren’t his main problem.

He twitched, and turned to the ghost sitting nearest him on his left. The man was breaking off fragments of mortar from between the cinder blocks of the wall, and eating them.

“You’ll choke,” Oaks rasped.

“Hyuck-hyuck. Choke on this” said the ghost, without any gesture. “I’m choking,” said Oaks. “If you choke on one of those rocks, a Heimlich maneuver could unblock it, right? How can I unblock a spoiled ghost from my mind-pipe? Do you know?”

The ghost wrinkled his spotty forehead in a frown, and then began counting off points on the fingers of one hand. “Okay, you got stones in your ears and a magnet up your nose, right? And toads have got a stone in their heads. The Venerable Bead. And plenty of people have got shrapnel and metal plates in them, and steel hips. Check it out. Learnest Hand Hemingway used to save the shrapnel that came out of his legs and put it in little bowls so that his friends could take the bits as souvenirs; and eat them, of course, to get a bit of Hemingway.” He smiled. “Everything is a Learnest experience. The golden rule to be in-got at the College of Fortuitous Knox. Fort You-It-Us Knocks.” (The unattained pun made the intended spelling clear.) “It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me.”

“That’s good,” said Oaks hopelessly. “Tell him hello from me, if you ever run into him again.”

There was apparently no help to be had from the ghosts themselves. Oaks was choked, and the only way he knew how to unjam himself was likely to kill him. This time. Instead of just costing him another limb.

He could remember all kinds of things now. He remembered that Thomas Alva Edison had choked him this way once before—or at least once before—in 1929. Small surprise that the flattened face on the Music Center parking-level stairs had looked familiar! No wonder the Edison logo on the side of the truck had upset him! He should have paid attention to his forebodings. Thomas Alva Edison had never been any good for him.

AS THE shock-loosened memories had come arrowing up to the surface of his mind, one right after another, during his endless odyssey last night, Oaks had learned that he had always been an ambitious fellow, setting his sights on the most powerful people around and then trying to catch them unguarded so that he could snatch out of their heads their potent ghosts.

He had pursued the famous escape artist Harry Houdini for at least sixteen years—fruitlessly. Houdini had evaded every trap, had been effectively masked, psychically inaccessible, at every face-to-face confrontation. Houdini had even given protection to his friends: there had been a writer of horror stories in Rhode Island to whom Houdini had given his own severed thumb in June of 1924; Houdini had had his plaster mask-hands made by then, and could assume them and make them flesh any time he liked, and so he didn’t need the original-issue thumb anymore, and besides, Houdini had probably known that he himself was only a couple of years from death at that point. In Los Angeles, Houdini had even picked up some kind of electric belt for this writer friend, an electromagnetic device that could supposedly cure all kinds of ailments, including Bright’s disease and cancer—which pair of illnesses the writer died of in 1937, in fact, for he had been skeptical of the belt and disgusted by the thumb, and had got rid of them.

Houdini himself had been untouchable, a genuine escape artist…even though Oaks had eventually managed to arrange his physical death on a Halloween. It had been useless, for even in the moment of his dying Houdini had eluded him. Trying to catch Houdini had always been like trying to cross-examine an echo, wound an image in a mirror, sniff out a rose in an unlighted gallery of photographs of flowers.

Houdini’s parents must have known right from his birth that their son had a conspicuous soul, for they had taken quick, drastic steps to hamper access to it. Confusingly, they had given him the name Erik, which was the same name they’d given to their first son, who had died of a fall while still a baby; and within weeks of Houdini’s birth they had moved from Budapest to London to goddamn Appleton, Wisconsin!—and given an inaccurate birth date for him.

Slippery name, vast distance from his birthplace, and a bogus birthday. Worthless coordinates.

And the boy had compounded the snarling of his lifeline by running away at the age of twelve to be an itinerant boot polisher for the U.S. Cavalry. When that proved to be an unreliable career, he had just drifted, riding freight trains around the Midwest—begging, doing manual labor on farms, and learning magic from circus sideshows. With no real name or address or nativity date, his soul had no ready handles, and such ghost fanciers as might have been intrigued by the weirdly powerful boy were no doubt left holding a metaphorical empty coat while the boy himself was safely asleep in a probably literal outward-bound boxcar.

Sherman Oaks had certainly been pursuing Houdini by 1900, when the magician was twenty-six years old (Oaks had no clue as to how old he himself might have been), but Oaks had not ever managed to get Houdini’s soul squarely in his sights.

In the moment of opening up the jaws of his mind for the kill, for the forcible extraction of another self from its living body, his plain physical vision always became a superfluous blur, and he relied on the sensed identity coordinates of the other self, like a pilot making an instrument landing by following a homing beam in bad weather.

Just when he would be zeroing in on the thing that was “Houdini,” it became something else, and the real Houdini would be gone.

Once, in Paris in 1901. Oaks had psychically traced Houdini to a sidewalk cafe—but when Oaks walked up to the place with a gun in his pocket, seven bald men at the tables in front simultaneously took off their hats and bowed their heads, revealing the seven letters H-O-U-D-l-N-I painted one apiece on their shining scalps, and that grotesque assembly were as the only “Houdini” that was present.

Always in his stage act Houdini was untraceably switching places with his wife (whom he had taken care to marry in three different ceremonies); another favorite trick was escaping out of a big milk can that was filled with water and padlocked shut—so that each escape was confusingly like a reexperienced birth. (Slippery!) In Boston in the fall of 1911, Oaks had been closing in on Houdini—the magician was weakened with a fever and haunted by dreams of his dead older brother—when suddenly the magician’s psychic ground-signal was extinguished; Oaks had panicked, and expended far too much energy trying to find the ghost; and then, recuperating in defeat afterward, learned that the magician had had himself chained inside the belly of a dead sea monster during the eclipsed period. (The creature had been washed up dead on a Cape Cod beach, and was described as “a cross between a whale and an octopus.”)

In the 1920s Oaks had got closer. Houdini had begun a new career as an exposer of phony spiritualist mediums who weren’t entirely phony, and ghosts themselves had begun to threaten him. The famous Boston medium Margery gave a séance near Christmas of ‘24, and the ghost of her dead brother Walter announced that Houdini had less than a year to live. Houdini lived out the year, but on Halloween of 25, he was stricken with a “severe cold,” and after a brief, restless sleep stayed up all night. Oaks had managed to get into Houdini’s hotel room, but the sick magician had climbed out the window and disappeared until showing up protected at the Syracuse train station the next day.

On the following Halloween, in 1926, Oaks had managed to end the chase. Houdini’s wife Bess got ptomaine poisoning from rat excrement that Oaks had managed to put into her dinner, and the magician had to travel without her masking presence. On October 11, in Albany, a ghost had been coached to walk translucently out onto the stage where a manacled Houdini was being hoisted into the air by his bound ankles and lowered into his Water Cell, a glass-sided tank from which he was supposed to escape; the ghost got itself caught in the pulleys, and Houdini was jokingly dropped a foot before the rope retightened, and a bone in his left ankle was broken. Houdini didn’t try to complete that trick, but bravely went on with the rest of his act. Then, on October 22 at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a blurry-minded religious student was induced to visit the magician in his dressing room and try Houdini’s claim to be able to withstand the hardest punches; the student struck without giving Houdini any warning so that he could brace himself, and the four solid blows ruptured the magician’s appendix.

Houdini of course didn’t stop performing. He finished the run in Montreal the next day, and on the twenty-fourth he opened at the Garrick Theater in Detroit. But Oaks had known that the man was dying now. That night Houdini was admitted to Grace Hospital, diagnosed with streptococcal peritonitis.

And so Oaks had got what might have been the first of his janitorial jobs at a hospital. It took Houdini a week longer to die, and in that time Oaks managed to snag a few fresh ghosts—but when Houdini finally did die, at 1:26 p.m., he died masked. Oaks was ready to catch him, and strained numbingly hard after Houdini’s ghost when the magician died, but the old magician had been as slick as ever, and his ghost had darted away from Oaks’s grasp in a flicker of false memories and counterfeit dates and assumed identities.

Oaks had seized and devoured a splash of fresh ghosts—but they had nothing to do with Houdini. Later he learned that a baby girl had been born in the same instant as Houdini’s death, and he realized that what he had caught was the natal explosion of stress-thrown ghost-shells emitted by the newborn infant.

It had been tasty, but it had not been Houdini.

Spiritually depleted by the decades of that useless pursuit, Oaks had gone hungrily after the other psychically conspicuous figure of the time—Thomas Alva Edison. And he had had no luck there either.

SHERMAN OAKS boosted himself down off the cinder-block wall and shambled across the parking lot.

At some weary point last night he had got on a bus. He had dozed off, and when he’d snapped awake he had been sitting in a moving streetcar, one of the old long-gone Red Car Line, and he had passively ridden it south to the Long Beach Pike on the shore of Long Beach Harbor. He had got out of the streetcar and dazedly walked up and down the arc-lit midway, among the tattoo parlors and the baseball-pitch booths, startled repeatedly by the ratcheting clank of the Ferris-wheel chain and the snap-clang of .22 rounds being fired at steel ducks in the shooting gallery. The only lighted construct against the blackness of ocean had been the Cyclone Racer roller coaster—the Queen Mary had still been somewhere on the other side of the world, steaming across the sunlit face of the Atlantic.

On the street in front of him this morning he was seeing Marlboro billboards with slogans in Spanish, and Nissans and the boxy new black-and-white RTD diesel buses; the Mexican teenagers at the corner were wearing untucked black T-shirts and baggy pants with the crotches at their knees, and from the open window of a passing Chevy Blazer boomed some Pearl Jam song. He was living in 1992 again—the bus trip last night had been a brief tour through long-lost snapshots, requickened memories.

Yesterday, in the minivan in the back of the truck, he had animated one of the memories that had been tumbling back into him since Monday night—a moving-picture snapshot of the old Angel’s Flight cable car that used to climb the hill from Third Street to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, until it was torn down for redevelopment schemes in the sixties. He had projected the hallucination to help awaken the clathrated ghost inside the boy, excite the ghost like an atom in a laser tube, so that Oaks would be sure of sucking the big old ghost out, along with the boy’s trivial ghost, when he would finally succeed in killing the boy. And then Edison’s ghost had countered by animating a relevant and defensive snapshot-memory of its own.

As much as it had been a shock to Oaks to realize that it was a memory they happened to have in common, it must also have been a shock to the ghost of Thomas Edison.

OAKS HAD gone after the world-famous inventor in late 1926—but the memory that the Edison ghost had projected had shown Oaks trying to get that ghost at a far earlier time, when Edison had been an anonymous but obviously strong-spirited boy selling snacks and papers on a train somewhere near Detroit.

Oaks thought about that now. In that surprisingly shared memory the boy Edison had been…twelve? Fifteen? God, that would have to have been in the early 1860s, during the Civil War! Oaks had been an adult…a hundred and thirty years ago!

How old am I? wondered Oaks bewilderedly. How long have I been at this?

Well, I was no more successful with damnable Edison in 1929 than I was on that train during the Civil War.

Or in the truck yesterday.

AS SOON as he had recovered from the loss of Houdini’s ghost, Oaks had made his way to Edison’s home in East Orange, New Jersey; and then down the coast to the “Seminole Lodge” on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison and his wife spent the winters.

Edison had been eighty years old then. He had retired from the Edison Phonograph Company only weeks earlier, leaving it in the hands of his son Charles, and was planning to devote his remaining years to the development of a hybrid of domestic goldenrod weeds that would yield latex for rubber, to break the monopoly of the British Malayan rubber forests.

The old man might as well have been made of rubber, for all the dent Oaks had been able to put in him during the next couple of years.

Edison had invented motion pictures, and voice-recording, and telephones, largely for their value as psychic masks, and with a transformer and an induction coil and a lightning rod with some child’s toy hung on it he could have ghosts flashing past as rapidly as the steel ducks in the Pike shooting gallery, confounding any efforts to draw a bead on the real spirit of Edison behind all the decoys.

But Oaks had managed to sneak carbon tetrachloride into the old mans coffee in the summer of 1929, and as the kidneys began to tail and the doctors speculated about diabetes, the psychic defenses had weakened too; like the van der Waals force that lets an atom’s nucleus have a faint magnetic effect when its surrounding neutralizing electrons are grossly low in energy, the old man’s exhaustion was letting his real self gleam through the cloud of distracting spectral bit-players and simulations.

Oaks had begun to move in—but Edison’s friend Henry Ford had moved more quickly. As an exhibit in his Ford Museum, in Dearborn Michigan, he had built a precise duplicate of Edison’s old Menlo Park laboratory. It couldn’t even be dismissed as a replica, for he had used actual boards and old dynamos and even dirt from the original. And Edison visited the place, and was emotionally moved by it, thus grievously fragmenting his psychic locus.

Ford had arranged a gala “Golden Jubilee of Light” to be celebrated on the 21st of October at the Dearborn museum. Oaks had met Edison—along with Ford and President Hoover!—at a railway station near Detroit, and in Edison’s honor the whole party had transferred to a restored, Civil War-vintage wood-burning locomotive.

In the instant when Oaks was poised to kill Edison and inhale the man’s ghost—and then escape somehow—a period-costumed trainboy had walked down the aisle of the railway car, carrying a basket of traveler’s items for sale. Edison, sensing Oaks’s momentarily imminent attack, snatched the basket from the boy—and then the eighty-two-year-old inventor tottered a few steps down the aisle, weakly calling, “Candy, apples, sandwiches, newspapers!”

And so the image in Oaks’s psychic sights was fragmented in the instant of his striking; there were suddenly two Edisons in the car, or else perhaps two boys and no Edison at all. Oaks managed to keep from uselessly, blindly firing the gun in his pocket, but he was unable to restrain his long-prepared psychic inhalation.

Edison had been ready for him, too. He must have set up this replay of the remembered train scenario as a trap. The old man smashed a doctored apple against a wooden seat back and shoved the split fruit into Oaks’s face, and Oaks helplessly inhaled the confined, spoiled ghost that had been put into it.

OAKS HAD been… jammed up.

Not yet sure what had happened to him, knowing only that he had failed to get Edison, Oaks had stumbled off the antique train at Dearborn and disappeared into the crowd.

And he had discovered that he couldn’t eat ghosts anymore—and that he needed to. The Bony Express had begun to assail his identity inside his head, and he could feel himself fragmenting as their power increased and his own declined.

Desperately reasoning that what Edison had done, Edison could undo, he had tried to get an audience with the great man—after all, he hadn’t done anything obviously overt on the tram, and he had actually worked for a while at Edison’s Kinetoscope studio in the Bronx in the early nineteen-teens, to make pocket money and calculate countermasking techniques, while keeping up his pursuit of Houdini—but Ford and Charles Edison had kept him away, and kept Edison secluded and effectively masked.

And so Oaks had returned to Eos Angeles in despair, to commit suicide while he “still had a sui to cide,” as he had grimly told himself.

The method he chose was sentimental. He went to his stash box, a rented locker in a South Alameda warehouse in those days, and selected a choice smoke he’d been saving—and then he drew it into a hypodermic needle and injected the five cc’s of potent air into the big vein inside his left elbow.

He expected the air bubble to cause an embolism and stop his heart.

Instead, the ghost he had injected, perceiving itself to be in a host that was about to fragment into death, spontaneously combusted in idiot terror.

The detonation had blown most of the flesh off of the bones of Oaks’s arm, and the doctors at Central Receiving Hospital on Sixth Street had amputated the limb at the shoulder.

Oaks had been put in the charity ward, with drunks and bar-fight casualties, and when he woke up after the surgery it wasn’t long before one of his wardmates expired of an infected knife wound.

And Oaks caught the ghost; ate it, assumed it, got a life. The explosion had cost him his arm, but it had also unblocked his psychic windpipe.

HE COULD do that again, any time; bottle one of the palindrome-confounded ghosts, bum a needle somewhere, and then shoot the lively ghost into his…leg, this time? Right arm? And then be missing two limbs. And what was to prevent the ghost from being propelled the short distance to his heart before it blew up?

Oaks was twitching with the urge to try once more to inhale a ghost. Maybe it would work now—now that the sun was up, now that he’d remembered all these things, now that his goddamn teeth ached so fiercely from being clenched that he couldn’t see why they didn’t crumble to rotten sand between his jawbones, which seemed intent on crashing through one another—maybe that’s why he was clamping them shut, because otherwise they’d stretch apart just as forcefully, swing all the way around and bite his head off—

No. He had proved that it didn’t work anymore, he couldn’t ingest ghosts the way he was right now. He would shoot one into a vein if he had to, before the Bony Express could crash in through the walls of his identity and make a shattered crack-webbed crazed imbecile of him…

But first he would see if Edison couldn’t undo what Edison could do. At least Edison was a ghost now, without the resources he’d had as a living person; and he didn’t have Henry Ford protecting him anymore.

Just some kid. Some bleeding kid.

Oaks sighed, flinching at the multitude of outraged and impatient voices that shook his breath. His trembling left hand wobbled to the compass-pommel of his knife, and brushed the bulk of the revolver under his untucked shirt. Three more shots in it. One for himself, if everything worked out as badly as it could and even a ghost injected right into a vein didn’t unjam him.

But I found the kid once, he thought dully. I can find him again. And I can make Edison tell me how to get unjammed.

And then I can eat him at last.

Oaks reached his hand into the pocket of his baggy camouflage pants and dug out his money. He had a five and three ones and about three dollars in change. Enough for bus fare south, and a can of bean soup.

Better make it two cans, he thought. Tomorrows Halloween. This might be a demanding twenty-four hours, and already I feel like shit.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

“There’s nothing like eating hay when you’re faint,” he remarked to her, as he munched away.

“I should think throwing cold water over you would be better,” Alice suggested: “—or some sal-volatile.”

“I didn’t say there was nothing better,” the King replied. “I said there was nothing like it.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

RUBBERS,” said Neal Obstadt, using a pencil to push a tightly latex-sleeved vial across his desk. The roof of his penthouse office was folded back again, but the breeze out of the blue sky was chilly, and a couple of infrared space heaters had been rolled in and now glowed like giant open-walled toasters in the corners. “Why do they pack ‘em in rubbers?”

The vial was empty. All ten of the ghosts Sherman Oaks had paid as his November tithe had been compressed and sealed inside glass cartridges, along with some nitrous oxide for flavor, but Obstadt had kept one of the vials to roll around on his desk.

“The guys in the lab say they don’t,” said Canov impatiently. “They say it must be some kind of special gift wrap. Listen, I’ve got two urgent things. You said to monitor deLarava’s calls. She—”

Obstadt looked up sharply. “She’s said something? What?”

“No, nothing that seems to be important. She’s talked to that Webb guy in Venice, but he still hasn’t sensed the ghost she’s apparently got cornered there, the one that drove all those sea creatures onto the beach Wednesday morning. Mainly she’s busy setting up for her shoot on the Queen Mary tomorrow. But we—”

“Gift wrap,” Obstadt interrupted. “Gift wrap. Is it sarcasm? Disrespect? I’ve snorted nine of ’em already, and they’ve been primo, every one. A diorama of Los Angeles citizens. No complaints about the merchandise, and I’m a connoisseur. Still, rubbers. What do you think? Does he mean Go fuck yourself? Go fuck yourself safely?”

“She has a telephone line we weren’t aware of. Her listed office lines, and the phones in her stateroom on the Queen Mary—” Canov paused to peer nervously down at Obstadt, but Obstadt was staring at him with no expression. “She got another,” Canov blurted. “JKL-KOOT, that’s the number—”

“On those billboards. The famous Parganas kid.” Obstadt tried to think. “I’m like a cat,” he said absently, “I’ve got nine lives.” Nine of them he had snorted up, since yesterday afternoon! No wonder he couldn’t think—he was awash in other people’s memories, and the Los Angeles he pictured outside didn’t have freeways yet, and Truman or Eisenhower or somebody was president. “The Parganas kid! Are the cops still buying that Edison driver’s hijack story?”

“It looks like it. He’s been let go, after questioning, anyway.”

“Why does Loretta want that kid? Why did Paco Rivera want him, why really?” He waved his hand. “I know, his name was Sherman Oaks. A joke. We assumed it was Oaks that murdered the kid’s parents, and that he wanted to kill the kid because he could identify him; but…they both got away, right? Yesterday? Oaks and the Parganas kid?”

“Not together.”

“And Loretta wants the kid, too?”

After a pause, Canov shrugged. “Yes.”

Obstadt stuck his pencil into the opened vial and lifted it up. “The big smoke that hit town Monday night…” he said thoughtfully, whirling the vial around the pencil shaft. “Oaks would have been… terribly…aware of that. How old is the kid?”

“Eleven.”

“Not puberty yet, probably.” He was nodding. “The kid has got to have the big ghost. Either he’s carrying it, or he’s inhaled it and it’s grafted onto him, not assimilated. That’s why Loretta wants him, and why Sherman Oaks wanted him. Oaks can’t have got the ghost yet, or not as of yesterday afternoon, anyway, or the kid would be dead, not running around.”

Obstadt looked up from the spinning, condom-sheathed vial, and smiled at Canov. “Your guys caught the kid yesterday! Took him away from that yuppie couple, the dead Fussels! And you gave the kid to Sherman Oaks!” Obstadt was speaking in a wondering tone, still smiling, his eyes wide. “And if you had done what I told you, monitored fucking all of Loretta’s phone lines, I’d have the kid, I’d have the big ghost, which is probably goddamn Einstein or somebody, do you realize that?” Obstadt was still smiling, but it was all teeth, and he was panting and his face was red.

Almost a whisper: “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Good.” Obstadt knew that Canov must be aching to say, But you got a thousand and ten smokes! How big can this one be in comparison? You weren’t there, Obstadt thought, Canov my boy—you weren’t there Monday night, you weren’t aware, anyway, when that wave swept across L.A. and every streetlight dimmed in obeisance, every car radio whirled off into lunatic frequencies, and every congealed-ghost street bum fell down hollering.

“There’s another thing,” said Canov in a strangled tone. “You told me to check out any kids deLarava might have. No, she doesn’t seem to have any—but she’s looking for this Peter Sullivan, and she’s got a description of the van he’s driving, and the license number. He used to work for her, along with a twin sister of his named Elizabeth who everybody called Sukie, who killed herself in Delaware Monday night.”

“She did? Now, why—”

“Listen! The Sullivan twins were orphans, their father was a movie producer named Arthur Patrick Sullivan, okay? He drowned in Venice in 1959. Now Sullivan the Elder was the godfather of this Nicky Bradshaw character—”

“Who Loretta’s also looking for, right. Spooky, in that old TV show.” “And…and Sullivan the Elder had just got married to a starlet named Kelley Keith. He drowned, while she was on the beach watching, and then she took a lot of his money and disappeared.”

“In ‘59,” said Obstadt thoughtfully. “He drowned at Venice, and now Loretta’s… after the son, and the godson, and a big-time ghost that apparently came out of the sea…in Venice.”

“And she was obviously after the daughter too, but she killed herself. Clearly you follow my thinking.”

“Okay!” Obstadt opened his desk drawer and took out the glass cartridge that contained the last of Sherman Oaks’s tithe ghosts. The lab boys had painted a blue band around it to distinguish it from the others—the vial its smoke had come in had been tucked into a different kind of condom: Trojan, while the others were all Ramses. How do the lab boys know? he wondered. Nobody should be an expert at recognizing different kinds of rubbers.

Trojan—it reminded Obstadt of something, but Canov was speaking again.

“Loretta deLarava is almost certainly Kelley Keith,” he was saying, “and she seems to be unwilling to have that fact known.”

“Maybe she’s got crimes still outstanding,” mused Obstadt aloud, “hell, maybe she killed the old movie producer! Any number of possibilities. Whatever it is, we can use it to crowbar her, and she would be a useful employee. Meanwhile! Tomorrow is Halloween. Get all your men out—find the Parganas kid, and this Peter Sullivan, and Oaks, and bring ’em all to me. Alive, if that’s easily convenient, but their fresh ghosts in glass jars would be fine. Better, in a lot of ways.”

“But the Sullivan guy is masked; deLarava said so; he ditched one of her top sniffers outside of Miceli’s yesterday. And the big ghost and the kid can mask each other, and Sherman Oaks is nothing but a walking mask—he’s got no name or birth date, and the ghosts inside him probably have more personality definition than he does. We’d never catch their ghosts in vials, they’d be everywhere, like a flashlight beam through a kaleidoscope.”

“I don’t care,” said Obstadt, opening another drawer and lifting out the thermoslike inhaler. “I want Oaks out of the picture, by which I mean dead. He’s not just a dealer, he’s fallen into the product and become a junkie, a heavy smoker, a rival. And I want deLarava working for me, severely subservient to me.” He laid the glass cartridge into the slot at the top of the inhaler. “Do you know why water in a bucket hollows out and climbs the walls and gets shallower when you spin the bucket real fast?”

Canov blinked. “Uh, centrifugal force.”

“No. Because there’s other stuff around, for it to be spinning in relation to; the room, the city, the world. If the bucket of water was the only thing in the universe, if it was the universe, the water would be still, and you couldn’t tell if it was spinning or not. Spinning compared to what? The question wouldn’t have any meaning.”

“Okay,” said Canov in a cautious tone.

“So—” So I’m tired of being hollowed out, thought Obstadt, and of climbing the walls, and of getting shallow. I’m tired of not being the only person in the universe. “So I need to contain them, don’t I? As long as they’re existing at all. DeLarava I can contain by just owning her.”

“She’s doing her shoot aboard the Queen Mary tomorrow,” Canov reminded him, “the Halloween thing, about ghosts on the ship. Anything about that?”

“Ummm…wait, on that. I don’t think there’s anything much on the Queen Mary right now. Let’s see how you do at finding these people before sundown tonight, hm?”

“Okay.” Canov visibly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he scratched his beard. “I’m sorry about not finding the other phone line sooner—we—”

“Get out of my sight,” said Obstadt gently, with a smile.

After Canov had tottered out the door, Obstadt leaned back in his chair and looked up into the cold blue vault of the sky, wishing that the tiny crucifix of a jet would creep across it, just to break up the monotony of it.

Then he sighed and twisted the valve on the inhaler. He heard the hiss as the pressure from the punctured cartridge filled the inside of the cylinder, and then he lifted the tube to his lips.

The hit was cold with nitrous oxide, but nausea-sweat sprang out on his forehead at the hard, static absence of the rotted thing that rode the rushing incoming stench and wedged itself hopelessly sideways in the breech of his mind. The back of Obstadt’s head hit the carpet as his chair went over backward, and then his knees banged against a bookcase and clattered sideways to the floor, and he was convulsing all alone on the carpet under the high blue sky.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous….”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

AT eye-height on one of the glass shelves was a white bas-relief of Jesus done in reverse, with the face indented into a plaster block, the nose the deepest part—as if, Elizalde thought, Jesus had passed out face-first into a bowl of meringue. Someone had at some time reached into the hollow of the face to paint the eyes with painstaking lack of skill, and as Elizalde shuffled across the linoleum floor the head gave the illusion of being convex rather than concave, and seemed to swivel to keep the moronic eyes fixed on her.

What household out there, she asked herself nervously, is decorated to near perfection, lacking only this fine objet d’art to make it complete?

Frank Rocha's house had been full of things like that—prints of Our Lady of Guadalupe, tortured Jesuses painted luridly on black velvet. Elizalde nervously touched the bulge of her wallet in her back pocket.

The old woman behind the counter smiled at her and said, “Buenas días, mi hija. Cómo puedo ayudarte?”

“Quiero hacer reparaciones a un amigo muerto,” said Elizalde. How easy it was to express the idea, I want to make amends to a dead friend, in Spanish!

The woman nodded understandingly, and bent to slide open the back of a display case. Elizalde set down her grocery bag and clasped her hands together to still their trembling. Already she had stopped at a tiny corner grocery store and bought eggs and Sugar Babies and a pint of Myers rum and a cheap plastic compass with stickum on the back so that it could be glued to a windshield; and in another botánica she had bought a selection of herbs in cellophane packets, and oils in little square bottles, that she had been assured habría ojos abrir del polvo, would open eyes out of the dust—all of it had been set out on the counter in response to her request for something that would call up the dead.

Out of the display arrangement of stones and garish books and cheap metal medallions, the old woman now lifted a plastic bag that contained a sprig of dried leaves: YERBA BUENA read the hand-lettered sticker on the bag, and Elizalde didn’t even have to sniff it, just had to look at the dusty, alligator-bumpy leaves, to be surrounded by the remembered smell of mint; and, for the first time, she realized that the Spanish name meant good herb—over the generations her family had smoothed and elided the words to something that she would have spelled yerra vuena, which she had always taken to mean something like “fortunate error,” with the noun given an unusual feminine suffix.

“Incapácita las alarmas del humo en su apartamento,” the woman told her—quietly, though they were alone in the shop. “Hace un te cargado, con muchas hojas; anade algún licor, tequila o ron, y déjalo cocinar hasta que está seco, y deja las hojas cocinar hasta que están secas, y humando quemadas. Habla al humo.”

Elizalde nodded as she memorized the instructions—disable smoke alarms in the apartment, make a strong mint tea with booze in it, then cook it dry and let the leaves smoke, and talk to the smoke.

Jesus, she thought; and then in spite of herself she glanced at the disquieting bas-relief-in-reverse, which still seemed to be turned toward her, staring.

I still like “fortunate error,” she thought helplessly as she took the bag from the woman and handed her a couple of dollar bills. She tucked the dried mint into the bag with her other purchases, thanked the woman, and shuffled out of the store. Bells hung on the doorframe rang a minor chord out into the sunlight as she stepped down to the Beverly Boulevard sidewalk.

Two young boys whirled past her on bicycles, giggling, one of them riding with one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching the metal box of a car stereo. Looking in the direction they’d come from, she saw a blue scatter of car-window glass on the sidewalk, and a white-haired old woman wrapped in a curtain scooping up the bits of glass and eating them.

Up ahead of her on the other side of Beverly was the two-story, fifties-vintage building where she had rented her psychiatric office. She could see a vertical edge of it from here, and a corner of glowing green neon—it was still standing, apparently still occupied.

Well, she thought with a shudder of nausea, the fire trucks did get there damn quick.

Elizalde had rented a suite there for only a couple of months (before that final night, two years ago tomorrow)—a tiny reception room, her office, a bathroom, and the big conference room with windows looking out over Beverly (the glass of which had burst out in the intense heat of the flames).

At her Wednesday-night séances she would have the six or eight of her patients sit around the conference table, and after lighting a dozen or so candles on the shelves she would turn out the lights and have everyone hold hands. They took turns “sharing with the dead”—reliving old disagreements, talking with the dead sometimes, crying and praying sometimes—and Elizalde had tried to insist that if someone felt the need to say Fuck you, fuck you to the group and then storm out of the room, that it at least be done quietly.

Frank Rocha had always tried to get the seat next to Elizalde, and the palm of his hand was often damp and trembling. At the penultimate séance, a week before Halloween, he had passed her a folded note.

She had tucked it into her pocket, and only read it later, at home.

It had been painstakingly handwritten, and some misguided idea of formality had led him to draw quotation marks around nearly every noun (…my “love” for you… the lack of “understanding” from my “wife”…my concern for your “needs” and “wants”…my “efforts” to make a “life” for you and me…the “honor” of “marrying” you… ), which gave the thing an unintended tone of sarcasm. Elizalde had telephoned him at his job the next day and, as gently as she had been able, had told him that what he had proposed was impossible.

But she had cried over the note, alone in her living room late that Wednesday night, and she had kept it in her wallet through all the subsequent horrors and flight and migration.

ELIZALDE HADN’T wanted to leave the Long Beach apartment this morning—or at worst go any farther outside than to where Sullivan had parked the van, to fetch his meager food and some instant coffee and then hurry back inside—until the dawning of Sunday morning, when Halloween would safely be passed. But when Sullivan had begun to speculate on things that they ought to go buy before sundown today, his own readiness to be talked out of leaving Solville was so palpable that she had pretended to be unaware of it, and she’d made herself agree brightly to his proposed shopping trip. New socks and underwear, she noted, would be a necessity.

The apartment’s toilet had indeed proved to be hooked up to the hot-water pipe—the bathroom window was steamy. They took turns showering and getting back into yesterday’s unfresh clothes, and by the time they had moved the plaster hands away from the door and opened it to the fresh Friday-morning breeze, Sullivan was tightlipped and grumpy and Elizalde was brittle with imitation cheer.

Sullivan had furtively switched license plates with a pickup truck in the Solville parking lot, and then the two of them had driven off north into the skyline-spiked brown haze of Los Angeles, Sullivan to buy some “electronics” and Elizalde to cruise the botánicas and hierverias for any likely-looking séance aids.

“I think that, in addition to being wisps of stuff ghosts are an electromagnetic phenomenon,” Sullivan had said nervously as he steered the van along the middle lane of the Harbor Freeway, “something like radio waves. When they focus somewhere, like they do when something energizes them and wakes them up, gets them into their excited state, they’re located—a particle rather than a wave, for our purposes, or maybe a standing wave with perceptible nodes, sort of low-profile ball lightning—and they’re detectably magnetic. Sometimes strongly so.” Sullivan had been sweating. “I’ve seen them around the step-up transformers at power plants out in the desert, just a bunch of indistinct guys standing around blinking on the concrete, and if there’s enough of them their magnetic field can interfere with the power readouts. What I’m going to…try to do is scrounge together some gear that’ll isolate an individual ghost’s signal, step it up, and hook it to a speaker. Meanwhile, you can pick up whatever sort of voodoo stuff it is that…”

He had paused then, at least having the grace to be embarrassed ….that you used when you killed your patients two years ago, she had thought, mentally finishing his sentence for him.

She had given him a hooded gaze under one raised eyebrow. “You just be sure you get some spare big-amp fuses for your electronics, gabacho” she’d said quietly.

He had pursed his lips and nodded, clearly intimidated by her supposed connections to some vast, secret, potent brujeria folkórica.

Now, standing on the sidewalk in her stale clothes and stringy long hair, among the baby carriages and beer signs, watching the progress of all the old beat Torinos and Fairlanes with defeated suspensions and screeching power-steering belts, she wondered if she could accomplish anything at all.

Sullivan had told her about “bar-time,” and had explained that experiencing it was one of the consequences of being a spiritual antenna, with a psychic guilt-link to some dead person or persons; when hungry ghosts or ghost hunters focused their attention on her, she couldn’t help but put some of her spiritual weight on her “one foot in the grave;’ so that she lived just a fraction of a second outside of time, ahead of time He said it happened to all ghost-bound people.

And Sullivan had told her how dormant ghosts could be excited into fitful agitation by people such as themselves, and had told her how to spot the elusive creatures, once that had happened.

She had been careful not to make any of the moves that would rouse the things-she had not whistled any old Beatles tunes (Sullivan had told her that “The Long and Winding Road” was particularly evocative), nor, in this neighborhood, Santana’s “Oye Como Va”; she’d been careful not to pick up stray coins on the pavement, especially very shiny ones; and she had not stared into the eyes of the faces, faded to washes of pink and blue, in the photos taped up in the windows of the little hairstyling salons, for Sullivan had told her that frightened new ghosts would cling to those paper eyes and then wait to meet and hold on to an unguarded gaze.

She had bought the compass, though. Sullivan had told her that when a compass needle pointed in some direction besides north, it was very likely pointing at one of the awakened ghosts. She had kept it in her pocket and glanced at it frequently—and at one point during her shopping stroll she had walked wide around a dusty old Volkswagen sitting on flat tires in a parking lot, averting her eyes as she skirted it; and a few minutes later she had crossed Beverly to avoid the open front door of a corner bar; because the needle had swung away from north to point at these things.

Sullivan had told her to wait for him by the video games in the Raphael’s liquor store at the corner of Lucas Avenue, and now she started angling through the crowd in that direction. It would be better for her to be waiting for him inside than for him to have to idle in the parking lot in the conspicuous van. Her bag of purchases was heavy enough now, and her hip and shoulder still ached from her fall on the Amado Street sidewalk two days ago; and she was walking awkwardly, for she had tucked the thing that Sullivan swore was Houdini’s dried thumb into the high top of her left shoe, to balance the can of mace in her right one.

Un buen santo to encomiendas, she thought, quoting an old saying of her grandmother’s. A fine patron saint you’ve got.

At a red light, she leaned her elbow on the little steel cowl over the signal-change button on a curbside traffic-light pole—and then gasped with dizziness and heard the thump of the seat of her jeans and the grocery bag hitting the sidewalk in the instant before her vision jumped with the jar of the impact.

People were staring at her, and she thought she heard borracha!—drunk!—as she scrambled back up to her feet; the light box on the pole across the street had finally begun flashing WALK, and she hoisted her bag in both arms and marched between the lines of the crosswalk toward the opposite curb, sweat of embarrassment chilly on her forehead. Not until she heard a wet plop on the pavement by her foot, and looked down just in time to see an egg from her torn bag hit the asphalt, did she realize that she was on bar-time again.

She stepped up the curb so carefully that any bar-time effect was imperceptible, and then she crossed the sidewalk and leaned against the brick wall of a mariscos restaurant, panting in the steamy squid-and-salsa-scented air that was humming out of a window fan.

It could be just Sullivan nearby, she told herself nervously; he said we can have that effect when we’re together, our antenna fields overlapped and making “interference fringes”—it happened with him and his twin sister all the time, he said. Or it could be Frank Rocha, resonating in the sidewalk in forlorn response to the scuff of my sneakers (though the dried thumb in my shoe should be keeping any spiritoids from recognizing me). Maybe I just got confused, and thought I heard the egg break on the street before it really did; I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, a decent meal, in—

But of course she was standing right across the street now from 15415 Beverly. She looked up, slowly and sullenly; the two-story building had been repainted, but she couldn’t recall now anyway whether the fire had streaked the outside walls with soot. The windows of what had been her conference room had glass in them again, and between the glass and the curtains hung a green neon sign reading PSYCHIC—PALM READER.

Good luck to you, she thought bitterly to the present tenant. You’ll never host as good a show as I did.

ON THAT final Wednesday evening, that Halloween night, Frank Rocha had arrived very drunk. A week had passed since the night when she had read his clumsy letter, and, mostly out of guilt and uncertainty, she had let him stay at the meeting in spite of his condition. At one point early in the evening he had taken his hand out of hers, and had fumbled at something inside his leather jacket; after a muffled snap!, he had shuddered and coughed briefly, then returned his hand to hers, and the séance had proceeded. The smoke from the candles and incense had covered any smell of gunpowder, and Frank Rocha had continued to mumble and weep—no one present had realized that he was now dead, that he had neatly shot himself squarely through the heart with a tiny .22 revolver.

Later, in the darkness, he had again pulled his hand free, but this time it had been to squeeze her thigh under the table; not wanting to hurt his feelings, she had thought for a while before reaching down and firmly pushing his hand away. Luckily she had had her face averted from him.

With a blast of scorching air that hit her like a mailbag dropped from a tram, Frank Rocha’s body had exploded into white fire. Elizalde and the person who had been sitting on the other side of him were ignited into flame themselves and tumbled away in a screaming tangle of bodies and folding chairs, and everyone was dazzled to blindness by the man-sized, magnesium-bright torch that had been Frank Rocha.

And then the séance had started to be for real.

ELIZALDE LOOKED away from the white building across the street and made herself take deep, slow breaths.

Hoping to reassure herself, she dug the plastic compass out of her jeans pocket and looked at it—

But it was pointing southeast, straight ahead down Beverly toward the Civic Center.

The compass needle didn’t wobble in synch with any of the cars or pedestrians she could see. Unlike the readings she had got earlier at the abandoned Volkswagen and the barroom door, this one seemed to be some distance away.

There’s a…a ghost down that way, she thought carefully, trying to assimilate the idea. A big one.

A furniture truck made a ponderous low-gear left turn onto the boulevard from Belmont Avenue, and little Toyotas and big old La Bamba boat cars rattled along the painted asphalt, up toward Hollywood or down toward City Hall, and crows and pigeons flapped around the traffic lights or pecked at litter on the sidewalks in the chilly sunlight…but there was a big ghost awake and walking around somewhere clown Beverly in the direction of the Harbor Freeway.

THE GHOSTS had arrived at the séance sometime during the confused moments when curtains were being torn down from the windows and bundled around the people who had been set afire; Frank Rocha himself was a roaring white pyre that no one could get close to.

Half of Elizalde’s hair had been burned off, and after she’d been extinguished herself she had scorched her hands and face in a useless attempt to throw a curtain over Frank Rocha, but what she today remembered most vividly was the agony of listening to the shattering, withering screams.

The hallway doors had opened, and a lot of people had begun to come in who didn’t even seem to notice the fire; and they hadn’t walked in, but seemed to glide, or float, or flicker like bad animation. The light had been wrong on most of them—the shadows on their faces had not been aligned with the flaring corpse on the floor, and when their faces had happened to turn toward it, the incongruously steady shadows had abruptly looked like holes.

Others appeared from the ceiling—several of these were oversized infants, impossibly floating in midair, with the purple umbilical cords still swinging from their bellies, and their huge faces were red and their mouths hideously wide as they howled like tornadoes.

Bloody, mewling embryonic chicks pecked and clawed at Elizalde’s scorched scalp, and fell into her face when she tried to cuff them off.

Instead of running for the ghost-crowded doors, everyone had seemed to be scrambling to the corners, down on their hands and knees to be below the churning burnt-pork-reeking smoke. The clothing burst away from three of her patients, two women and a man, to release long fleshy snakes, which lifted like pythons as they grew, and then dented and swelled to form grimacing human faces on the bulbous ends.

The faces on the flesh-snake bulbs, and the shadow-pied faces of the intruding ghosts, and the red faces of the giant infants, and the blood-and-smoke-and-tear-streaked faces of Elizalde’s patients, all were shouting and screaming and babbling and praying and crying and laughing, while Frank Rocha blazed away like a blast furnace in the middle of the floor. By the time his unbearably bright body had shifted and rolled over and then fallen through the floor, the big windows had all popped and disintegrated into whirling crystalline jigsaw pieces and spun away into the darkness, and people had begun to climb out, hang from the sill, and drop to the flower bed below. Elizalde had dragged one unconscious woman to the window, and had then somehow hoisted the inert body over her shoulder and climbed out; the jump nearly broke her neck and her knees and her jaw, but when the fire trucks had come squealing across the parking lot Elizalde had been doing CPR on the unconscious patient.

ELIZALDE BLINKED now, and realized that she had been standing for some length of time on the curb, shivering and sweating in the cold diesel breeze.

That was all two years ago, she told herself. What are you going to do right now?

She decided to backtrack up Belmont and then walk on down to Lucas along some other street; Houdini’s thumb was still there tickling her, down behind her sweaty anklebone, but something had paid attention to her a few moments ago, and she didn’t want to blunder into some supernatural event. She turned around and walked into the mariachi jukebox noise of the mariscos place and bought a couple of fish tacos wrapped in wax paper just so as to be able to wheedle from the counterman a plastic bag big enough to slide her ruptured grocery bag into.

The next block up was Goulet Street, gray old bungalow houses that had mostly been fenced in and converted to body shops and tire outlets after some long-ago zoning change. As she hurried along the sidewalk past the sagging fences, a young man stepped up from beside a parked car and asked her what he could get her, and half a block later another man nodded at her and made whip-snapping gestures, but she knew that they were both just crack-cocaine dealers, and she shrugged and shook her head at each of them and kept walking.

On the morning after the séance, she had been remanded from the hospital into the custody of the police, charged with manslaughter; she spent that night in jail, and on the following day, Friday, she had put up the $50,000 bail—and then had calmly driven her trusty little Honda right out across the Mojave Desert, out of California. She hadn’t had a clue as to what had happened at her therapy session—she had known only two things about it: that Frank Rocha and two of the other patients had died, and—of course—that she herself had had a psychotic episode, suffered a severe schizophrenic perceptual disorder. She had been sure that she had briefly gone crazy—and she had not doubted that diagnosis until this last Monday night.

Walking along the Goulet Street sidewalk now, she wondered if she might have been better off when she had thought she was crazy.

AT LUCAS she turned right, and then turned right again into a narrow street that curved past the the rear doors of a liquor store and a laundry, back to Beverly. RAPHAEL’S LIQUOR was across the Beverly intersection, and she was hurrying, hoping Sullivan wasn’t parked there yet.

But the compass was still in her hand, and she glanced at it. The needle was pointing behind her, which was north.

Good old reliable north, she thought. She sighed, and felt the tension unkink from her shoulders—whatever had been going on was apparently over—but she glanced at it again to reassure herself, and saw the needle swing and then hold steady.

Grit crunched under her toes as she spun around to look back. A hunched, dwarfed figure was lurching toward her from around the corner of the liquor store.

Duende! she thought as she twisted to get her balance leaned back the other way; it’s one of those malevolent half-damned angels the women on the beach told me about last night!

Then she had crouched and made a short hop to get her footing and was striding away toward Beverly, in her retinas burning the glimpsed image of a gaunt face behind glittering sunglasses under a bobbing straw cowboy hat.

But a battered, primer-paint-red pickup truck had turned up from Beverly, its engine gunning as the body rocked on bad shocks, and she knew that the half-dozen mustached men in wife-beater T-shirts crouching in the back were part of whatever was going on here.

Elizalde sprinted to the back wall of the laundry, leaning on it and hiking up her left foot to dig out it the can of mace; but the men in the truck were ignoring her.

She looked back—the duende had turned and was hurrying away north, but it was limping and clutching its side, and making no speed. The truck sped past Elizalde and then past the duende, and made a sharp right, bouncing up over the curb. The men in the back vaulted out and grabbed the dwarfish figure, whose only resistance was weak blows with pale little fists.

The hat spun away as the men lifted the small person by the shoulders and ankles, and then the oversized sunglasses fell off and she realized that the men’s prey was just a little boy.

Even as she realized it, she was running back there, clutching the bag in her left arm, her right hand thumbing the cap of the mace spray around to the ready position.

“Déjalo marchar!” she was shouting. “Qué estás hacienda? Voy a llamar a policía!”

One of the men who wasn’t holding the boy spun toward her with a big brown hand raised back across his shoulder to hit her, and she aimed the little spray can at his face and pushed the button.

The burst of mist hit him in the face, and he just sat down hard on the asphalt; she turned the can toward the men holding the boy and pushed the button again, sweeping it across their faces and the backs of their heads alike, and then she stepped over the spasming, coughing bodies and shot a squirt into the open passenger-side window of the truck.

A quacking voice from the bed of the truck called, “No me chingues, Juan Dominguez!”—but she didn’t see anyone back there, only some kind of cloth bag with a black Raiders cap on it. The bag seemed to have spoken, in merry malevolence.

The boy had been dropped, and had rolled away but not stood up; Elizalde’s own eyes were stinging and her nose burned, but she bent down to spray whatever might be left in the can directly into the faces of the two men who had only fallen onto their hands and knees. They exhaled like head-shot pigs and collapsed.

Elizalde dropped the emptied can and hooked her right hand under the boy’s armpit and hoisted him up to his feet. She was still clutching her bag of supplies in the crook of her left arm.

“Gotta run, kiddo,” she said. “Fast as you can, okay? Corre conmigo, bien? Just across the street. I’ll stay with you, but you’ve got to motivate with your feet. Vayamos!”

He nodded, and she noticed for the first time the faded bruise around his left eye. Not stopping to retrieve the hat and the sunglasses, she frog-marched him back around the liquor store to the Lucas Avenue sidewalk and started down it toward the stoplight.

Across the wide, busy street she could see the dusty brown box that was Sullivan’s van.

She looked behind her—there was no sign of the pickup truck.

The boy seemed to be able to walk, and she let go of him to dig the compass out of her pocket. The needle was pointed straight east. The ghost’s still ahead of us, she thought nervously; then she held it out in front of them, and the needle swung back toward north.

She moved it around, to be sure—and it was consistently pointing at the boy who was lurching along beside her.

She knew that she would change her pace, one way or the other, when she gave that new fact a moment’s thought—so she instantly gripped the compass between her teeth and began to walk faster, dragging the boy along, lest she might otherwise stop, or ditch him and just flat-out run.

This boy is the ghost, she told herself; Sullivan said they can accumulate mass from organic litter, and eventually look like solid street people.

But Elizalde couldn’t believe it. For a moment she pulled her attention away from the sidewalk pedestrians they were passing, and craned her neck to look down into his pinched, pale face—and she couldn’t believe that a restless ghost could have made those clear brown eyes, now pellucidly deep with fear, out of gutter puddles and sidewalk spit and tamale husks. And his eye socket was bruised! Surely the bogus flesh of those scarecrows couldn’t incorporate working capillaries and circulating blood! He must have a ghost…on him, somehow, like an infestation of lice.

A big ghost, she reminded herself uneasily, remembering how steadily the compass needle had pointed at it from blocks away.

She still couldn’t see the red pickup truck, behind or ahead. Apparently the mace had worked.

They had nearly reached the corner. She spat the compass into her shopping bag. “What’s your name?” she asked, wondering if she would even get a response.

“The kid’s in shock,” said the boy huskily, his voice jerking with their fast steps. “Better you don’t know his name. Call me…Al.”

“I’m Angelica,” she said. Better you don’t know my last name, she thought. “A friend of mine is in that brown van across the street. See it?” She still had her hand under his arm, so she just jerked her chin in the direction of the van. “Our plan is to get out of here, back to a safe place where nobody can find us. I think you should come with us.”

“You’ve got that compass,” said the boy grimly. “I’ve been in a Van,’ and I can scream these lungs pretty loud.”

“We’re not going to kidnap you,” said Elizalde.

They shuffled to a rocking halt at the Lucas corner, panting and waiting for the light to turn green. Elizalde was still looking around for pursuit. “I don’t even know if my friend would want another person along,” she said. She shook her head sharply, wondering if it could even be noon yet. “But I think you should come with us. The compass—anybody in the whole city who knows about this stuff can track you.”

The boy nodded. At least he was standing beside her, and hadn’t pulled away from her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That is true, sister. And if I put my light back under the bushel basket, if I—step out of the center-ring spotlight, here, this kid will collapse like a sack of coal. So you’ve got a place that’s safe? Even for us? How are you planning on degaussing me? This damned electric belt’s not worth one mint.”

Hebephrenic schizophrenia? wondered Elizalde; or one of the dissociative reactions of hysterical neurosis? MPD would probably be the trendy analysis these days—multiple personality disorder.

She floundered for a response. What had he said? Degaussing? Elizalde had heard that term used in connection with battleships, and she thought it had something to do with radar. “I don’t know about that. But my friend does—he’s an electrical engineer.”

This seemed to make the boy angry. “Oh, an electrical engineer! Ail mathematics, I daresay, equations on paper to match the paper diploma on his wall! Never any dirt under his fingernails! Maybe he thinks he’s the only one around here with a college degree!”

Elizalde blinked down at the boy in bewilderment. “I—I’m sure he doesn’t—I have a college degree, as a matter of fact—” Good Lord, she thought, why am I bragging? Because of my rumpled old clothes and tangled hair? Bragging to a traumatized street kid? “But none of that’s important here—”

“B.S.,” said the boy now, with clear and inexplicable pride. “Let’s go meet your electrical engineer.”

“Shit, yes,” said Elizalde. The light turned green, and they started walking.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

“But that’s not your fault” the Rose added kindly.

“You re beginning to fade, you know—and then one ca’n’t help one’s petals getting a little untidy.”

Alice didn't like this idea at all…

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

SULLIVAN had seen Elizalde crossing the street, and when he saw that the reason she was moving slowly was because she was helping a limping kid along, he swore and got out of the van.

He had noticed the onset of bar-time as he’d been driving, five or ten minutes ago, when he reflexively tapped the brake in the instant before the nose of a car appeared out of an alley ahead of him; he had then tested it by blindly sliding a random cassette into the tape player, cranking the volume all the way up, and then turning on the player—he had not only cringed involuntarily, but had even recognized the opening of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” just before the first percussive yell had come booming out of the speakers. He had switched the set off then, wondering anxiously what was causing the psychic focus on him, and if it was on Elizalde too.

And now here she was with some kid.

He met them by the traffic-light pole at the corner, and he took the shopping bag from her. “Say goodbye to your little friend,” he said. “We’ve gotta go now Bar-time, you feel it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, smiling. “Other people out here probably do too. Act natural, like you don’t feel it.”

She was right. He smiled stiffly back at her and hefted the bag. “So, did you get your shopping done? All ready to go?”

Two teenage Mexican boys swaggered up to them, one of them muttering, “Vamos a probar la mosca en leche, porqué no?” Then one of them asked her, in English, “Lady, can I have a dollar for a pack of cigarettes?”

“Porqué no?” echoed Elizalde with a mocking grin. She reached into her pocket with the hand that wasn’t supporting the sick-looking boy, and handed over a dollar.

“I need cigarettes too!” piped up the other teenager.

“You can share his,” said Elizalde, turning to Sullivan. “We’re ready to go”, she told him.

We’re not taking this sick kid along with us! he thought. “No,” he said, still holding his smile but speaking firmly. “Little Billy’s got to go home.”

“Auntie Alden won’t take him today,” she said, “and it’s getting very late.” ‘

Sullivan blew out a breath and let his shoulders sag. He looked at the boy. “I suppose you do want to come along.”

The boy had a cocky grin on his face. “Sure, plug. On your own, you might get careless and open a switch without turning off the current first.”

Sullivan couldn’t help frowning. He had spent the morning at an old barn of a shop on Eighth Street called Garmon’s Pan-Electronics and he wondered if this boy knew that, somehow. Was the boy’s remark the twang of a snapped trap-wire?

“I told him you’re an electrical engineer,” said Elizalde in a harried voice. “Let’s go!”

After a tense, anguished pause: “Okay!” Sullivan said, and turned and began marching his companions back across the liquor-store parking lot toward the van. “The collapsing magnetic field,” he told the boy, in answer to the boy’s disquieting remark, “will induce a huge voltage that’ll arc across the switch, right?” Why, he wondered, am I bothering to prove anything to a kid?

“Don’t say it just to please me,” the boy told him.

When they had climbed into the van and pulled the doors closed, Sullivan and Elizalde sat up front, and the boy sat in the back on the still-unmade bed.

“Why did you give that guy a buck?” asked Sullivan irritably as he started the engine and yanked the gearshift into drive.

“He might have been Elijah,” Elizalde said wearily. “Elijah winders around the Earth in disguise, you know; asking for help, and if you don’t help him you get in trouble at the Last Judgment.”

“Yeah?” Sullivan made a fast left turn onto Lucas going south, planning to catch the Harbor Freeway from Bixel off Wilshire. “Well, the other guy was probably Elijah, the guy you didn’t give a buck to. Who’s our new friend, by the way?”

“Call me Al,” spoke up the boy from the back of the van. “No, my name’s Kootie—” The voice sounded scared now. “—where are we going? It’s all right, Kootie, you remember how I didn’t trust the Fussels? These people are square. I’m glad you’re back with us, son. I was worried about you.”

Sullivan shot Elizalde a furious glance.

“He’s magnetic,” she said. She seemed near tears. “Compasses point to him. And I used up my mace spray on a crowd of bad guys who were trying to force him into a truck.”

“It’s okay,” Sullivan said. “That’s good, I’m glad you did. I wish I’d been there to help.” Good God, he thought. “Did you get some likely…groceries?”

“I think so.” She sighed deeply. “Did you hear what those two vatos said? They described you and me as la mosca en leche. That means fly-in-milk—like ‘salt-and-pepper,’ you know, a mixed-race couple. They thought I was a Mexican.”

Sullivan glanced at her. “You are a Mexican.”

“I know. But it’s nice that they could tell. How did you do, did you get some good electronic stuff?”

Sullivan was looking into the driver’s mirror on the outside of the door. A new Lincoln had sped up to make the light at Beverly, and it was now swerving into the right lane as if to pass him. He was glad of the distraction, for he didn’t want to talk about the ragtag equipment he’d bought.

“Not bad,” he said absently, “considering I didn’t know what I wanted.” When the Lincoln was alongside, Sullivan pressed the brake firmly, and the big car shot ahead. “They had some old carborundum-element bulbs there cheap, so I bought a few, and I got an old Ford coil for fifty bucks, and a Langmuir gauge.” He made a show of peering ahead with concern.

But the Lincoln ahead had actually slowed, and now another one just like it was speeding up from behind. “Other stuff,” he added—nearly in a whisper, for something really did seem to be going on here. His palms were suddenly damp on the wheel.

There was a cross street to the right ahead, and he waited until the last instant to touch the brake and whip the wheel around to cut directly across the right-hand lane; the tires were screeching, and a bar-time jolt of vertigo made him open the sharp turn a little wider before the van could roll over, and then he had stamped the gas pedal and they were roaring down the old residential street.

A glance in the mirror showed him the second Lincoln coming up fast behind him. He could hear the roar of the car’s engine.

“Bad guys,” he said breathlessly. “Fasten your belts—kid, get down somewhere. I’m gonna try to outrun ‘em. They want us alive.”

The other Lincoln had somehow looped back, and was now rushing up behind the nearer one, which was swerving to pass Sullivan on the left. Sullivan jerked the wheel that way to cut the car off, and he kept his foot hard on the gas pedal.

A loud, rapid popping began, and the van shuddered and rang and shook as splinters whined around the seats. Sullivan snatched his foot off the gas and stomped the brake; Elizalde tumbled against the dashboard as the front end dropped and the tires screamed, and then as the van slewed and ground to a halt, and rocked back, he slammed it into reverse and gave it full throttle again.

The closer Lincoln had driven up a curb and run over a trash can. Sullivan had to hunch around to watch the other one through the narrow frames of the back windows, for the door mirror had been blown out; the van’s rear end was whipping wildly back and forth as Sullivan fought the wheel, and he heard five or six more shots, but then the second Lincoln too had driven up onto a lawn to get out of Sullivan’s lunatic way, and the van surged back-end foremost right out into the muddle of Lucas Avenue.

A hard, smashing impact punched the van, and as Sullivan’s chin clunked the top of the seat back he heard two more crashes a little farther away. The van was stalled, and he clanked it into neutral and cranked at the starter. Feathers were flying around the stove and the bed in the back, where he had last seen the kid. At last the engine caught.

Sullivan threw the shift into Drive again and turned around to face out the starred windshield, and he hit the gas and the van sped away down Lucas with only a diminishing clatter of glass and metal in its wake.

Sullivan drove quickly but with desperate concentration, yanking the wheel back and forth to pass cars, and pushing his way through red lights while looking frantically back and forth and leaning on the horn.

When he was sure that he had at least momentarily lost any pursuit, he took a right turn, and then an immediate left into a service alley behind a row of street-facing stores. There was an empty parking space between two trucks, but his sweaty hands were trembling so badly that he had to back and fill for a full minute before he had got the vehicle into the space and pushed the gearshift lever into park.

“Kid,” Sullivan croaked, too shaky even to turn around, “are you all right?” His mouth was dry and tasted like old pennies.

In the sudden quiet, over the low rumble of the idling engine, he could now hear the boy sobbing; but the boy’s voice strangled the sobs long enough to choke out, “No worse than I was before.”

“‘They want us alive,’” said Elizalde from where she was crumpled under the dashboard. She climbed back up into the seat and shook glass out of her disordered black hair. “I’m glad you’ve got these guys figured out, you asshole.”

“Are you hit?” Sullivan asked her, his voice pitched too high. “They were shooting at us. Am I hit?” He spread his hands and looked down at himself, then shuffled his feet around to see them. He didn’t see any blood, or feel any particular pain or numbness anywhere.

“No,” said Elizalde after looking herself over. “What do we do now?”

“You—you left your jumpsuit in Solville. Get a jacket of mine from the closet in the back, and a T-shirt or something for the kid. Disguises. I got a baseball cap back there you can tuck your hair up into. You two take a bus back, you’ll look like a mother and son. I’ll drive the van, and—I don’t know, take backstreets or something. I think I’ll be out of trouble once I get on the freeway, but you’d be safer traveling in something besides this van.”

“Why don’t we all take the bus?” asked Elizalde. “Abandon the van?”

“He’d have to abandon the stuff he bought,” said the boy, who was still sniffling, “and a couple of these things aren’t useless rubbish.”

“Thanks, sonny,” said Sullivan, not happy that the kid had been examining his purchases. Then, to Elizalde, he said, “Oh—here.” He unsnapped the fanny-pack belt and pulled it free of his waist. “Have you ever shot a .45?”

“No. I don’t believe in guns.”

“Oh, they do exist, trust me.” He pulled the loop and the zippers sprang open, exposing the grip of the pistol under two straps. “See? Here’s one now.”

“I saw it last night, remember? I meant I don’t like them.”

“Oh, like them,” said Sullivan as he popped the snap on the straps and drew the pistol out of the holster sewed inside the fanny pack. Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, he managed to push the magazine-release button beside the trigger guard, but missed catching the magazine as it slid out of the grip. It clunked on the floorboards and he let it lie there. “I don’t like ’em. I don’t like dental surgery, either, or motorcycle helmets, or prostate examinations.”

He pulled the slide back, and the stubby bullet that had been in the chamber flicked out and bounced off Elizalde’s forehead.

“Ow,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“That’s a Colt,” said the boy, who had shuffled up behind Sullivan’s seat. “Army issue since 1911.”

“Right,” said Sullivan, peripherally beginning to wonder who the hell this boy was.

The slide was locked back, exposing the shiny barrel, and he tripped the slide release and it snapped forward, hooding the barrel again. He held the gun out toward her, grip first and barrel up, and after a long moment she took it.

“It’s unloaded now,” he said, “but of course you always assume it is loaded. Go ahead and shoot it through the floor—hold it with both hands. Jesus, not that way! Your thumbs have got to be around the side; that slide on the top comes back, hard, and if you’ve got your thumb over the back of it that way…well, you’ll have another severed thumb to stick in your shoe.”

She rearranged her hands, then pointed the pistol at the floor. Her finger visibly tightened on the trigger for several seconds—and then there was an abrupt, tiny click as the hammer snapped down.

Elizalde exhaled sharply.

“Nothing to it, hey?” said Sullivan. “Now, it’s got fair recoil, so get the barrel back down in line with your target before you take your second shot. The gun recocks itself, so all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger again. And again, if you need to. You’ll have seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, eight in all. If you hit a guy with one of ‘em, you’ll knock him down for sure.”

She took hold of the slide with her left hand and tried to pull it back as Sullivan had done; she got it halfway back against the compression of the spring, and had to let go.

“Try it again,” said Sullivan, “but instead of pulling the slide back with your left hand, just hold it steady, and push the gun forward with your right.” He was nervous about having the pistol unloaded for so many seconds, but wanted her to have as much sketchy familiarity with it as might be possible.

This time she managed to cock it, and again dry-fired it at the floor.

“Good.” Sullivan retrieved the fallen magazine and slid it up into the grip until it clicked, then jacked a round into the chamber and released the magazine again to tuck into the top of it the bullet that had bounced off Elizalde’s forehead. He slid the magazine into the grip again and clicked the safety up.

“Cocked and locked,” he said, handing it back to her carefully. “This fan-shaped ridged thing behind the trigger is the safety; pop it down, and then all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger. Keep it in the fanny pack, under the jacket, and don’t let the kid play with it.”

Sullivan’s chest felt hollow, and he was sweating with misgivings about this. He could have set up the pistol with the chamber empty, but he wasn’t confident that she’d be able to work the slide in a panicky second; and he could have left the hammer down, along with the safety engaged, but that would require that she remember two moves, and have the time for them, in that hypothetical panicky second.

“You still got money?” he asked her.

“Three or four of the twenties, and some ones and some change.”

“Fine. Grab the clothes and scoot.” To his own surprise, his head bobbed forward as if to kiss her; but he caught himself and leaned back.

She blinked. “Right.” To the boy, she said, “Is your name Kootie or Al?”

The boy’s mouth twitched, but finally he said, “Kootie.”

“All right, Kootie, let’s outfit ourselves and then get the hell out of here.”

IN THE dim living room of Joey Webb’s motel room off Grand Boulevard in Venice, Loretta deLarava sat on the bed and blotted her tears with a silk handkerchief. Obstadt’s man Canov had put her on hold, and she had been sitting here now lor ten minutes it seemed like, and the room reeked because Joey Webb, suspicious in an unfamiliar environment, had resumed his old precaution of hiding half-eaten Big Macs and Egg McMuffins behind the furniture.

“Hello, Loretta,” said Obstadt at last. His voice was echoing and weak. “Neal, I know about it, so don’t even waste a moment with lies. Why are you trying to impede me? You had your people try to kill Sullivan and the Parganas boy an hour ago! You should thank God that they got away. Now I want you to help me find them—and they’d better not be dead!—or I’ll call the police about the incident. I want, immediately, all the information you have—”

Obstadt inhaled loudly, and coughed. “Shut up, Loretta.”

“You can’t tell me to shut up! I can call spirits from the vasty deep—”

“Me too, babe, but do they come when you call? Face it, Loretta, nobody gives the least particle of a rat’s ass about your… magical prowess.”

Over the line she heard a familiar metallic splashing. The man was urinating! He had begun urinating during the conversation! He was going on in his new, labored voice: “You work for me, now, Miss Keith—sorry, Mrs. Sullivan—oh hell, I guess I know you well enough to just call you Kelley, don’t I?”

DeLarava just sat perfectly still, her damp handkerchief in front of her eyes. “I know you’re busy tomorrow,” Obstadt said, “so I’ll drive down and say…’Hi!’… at your ghost shoot on the Queen Mary. I need to quiz you about a problem that can arise in this ghost-eating business. And you’ll tell me everything you know.”

The line went dead. Slowly she lowered the phone back down onto the cradle. Then her hands flew to her temples and pressed inward, helping the rubber bands constrict her skull and keep the pieces of her mind from flying away like a flock of baby chicks when the shadow of the hawk was sweeping the ground.

“The egged van was at the canals yesterday,” remarked Webb, who was sitting cross-legged on top of the TV set.

She dragged her attention away from the stark fact that her false identity had been blown. (If Obstadt talked, and Nicky Bradshaw stepped forward and talked, she could conceivably be arraigned for murder; and, even worse, everyone would see through the deLarava personality to the fragmented fraud that was Kelley Keith; and even if Obstadt told no one, he knew, he could—intolerably—see it.)

“The van,” she said dully; then she blinked. “The egged van, Pete’s van! You didn’t call me? He was here in Venice? What was he doing?”

“Relax, ma’am! He wasn’t here. He must have loaned the van to a friend. This was a curly-haired shorter guy in a fancy coat with breakaway sleeves.”

“Breakaway sleeves…? Oh, Jesus, that was Houdini you saw! It was Sullivan wearing ray goddamn Houdini mask!”

“That was Pete Sullivan? This guy didn’t look anything like your pictures of him.” Webb frowned in thought. “Not at first, anyway. He did get taller.” “Damn it, it was him, trust me. What was he doing?”

“Oh. Oh, chatting up a bird. A-sparkin and a-spoonin’, I’m assumin’. Mex gal. She got taller too, after a while. She was trying to reason with a guy who was in love with her, a sulking man hiding in a drainage pipe. But when Neat Pete showed up with his joke dinner jacket and fine white hands, she decided to chat with him instead. They stood in a parking lot that was in a traffic whirlpool, so I couldn’t intuit what they said. Dig this—there was a Venice Farmer’s Market in that very parking lot this morning! I bought various vegetable items. I will cook a ratatouille.”

“Shut up, Joey, I’m trying to think.” Who on earth, she wondered, could this “Mex gal” be? Not just someone he met by chance, if the two of them took the precaution of talking in an eye of traffic. And the mask seems to have covered her too, giving her the appearance of some other person, which undoubtedly would have been Houdini’s wife, Bess! (What a mask!) (May thieving Sukie Sullivan’s ghost be snorted up by a shit-eating rat!) Was Pete in Venice looking for his father’s ghost? Did he find Apie’s ghost? What—

“Ratatouille,” said Webb, “is an eggplant-based vegetable medley. I tried to write MISTER ELEGANT once on a T-shirt, and it was days before I realized that I’d got it wrong, and I’d been walking around labeled MISTER EGGPLANT.”

“Shut up, Joey.” The Parganas kid, she thought, and Pete, and the “Mex gal” will be running scared now, keeping low; but maybe I can still get a line on Nicky Bradshaw. I’ll have to check my answering machine, see if there have been any Find Spooky calls.

And and and—Obstadt’s coming to the shoot on the Queen Mary tomorrow. He wants to know about some “problem that can arise with this ghost-eating business.” (How vulgar of him to speak plainly about it!) I’ll have to watch for a weakness in him, and be ready to assert myself. There’ll be high voltage, and steep companionways—and the whole damned ocean, right over any rail.

“You don’t seem to be getting ahold of anybody, do you?” Webb said, smiling and shaking his head.

“Joey, shut the fuck up and get out of my stinking face, will you?” She levered her bulk off of the bed and swung herself toward the door of the motel room. “Keep looking for Arthur Patrick Sullivan. He’s got to be here, or be coming ashore in the next twelve hours—you haven’t left this area, and you’d have sensed him if he was awake anywhere within several blocks of here, wouldn’t you?”

“Like American Bandstand.” Webb hopped down from atop the TV set, agile as an old monkey. “He can’t have got past the walls of my awareness,” he said, nodding mechanically. “Unless someone opened the gate to a Trojan horse. A Trojan sea horse, that would be, locally.”

“A Trojan…sea horse.” Her face was suddenly cold, and a moment later the marrow in her ribs tingled.

“Oh my God that fish, that goddamn fish!” she whispered. “Could Apie have been hiding inside that fish?” I am in control of nothing at all, she thought dazedly.

Webb gave her a look that momentarily seemed lucid. “If so, he’s gone.”

“If so,” she said, pressing her temples again, “he’s in L.A. somewhere.” She was panting, clutching at straws. “He’ll probably try to find Pete.”

“Oh well then, said Webb with a shrug and a grin. “Find one and you’ve found them both, right? It’s that simple!”

“That simple,” echoed deLarava, still panting. Tears were spilling down her shaking cheeks again, and she blundered out the door.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

“What else had you to learn?”

“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—”Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography…”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

SULLIVAN had parked the van in the shade under one of the shaggy carob trees at the back of the Solville parking lot, and then he had got out and looked the old vehicle over.

The back end was a wreck. The right rear corner of the body, from the smashed taillights down, was crumpled sharply inward and streaked and flecked with blue paint. Apparently it had been a blue car that had hit them when he had reversed out onto Lucas. The doors were still folded-looking and flecked with white from having hit Buddy Schenk’s Honda in the Miceli’s lot yesterday, and the bumper, diagonal now, looked like a huge spoon that had been mauled in a garbage disposal.

In addition to all this, he could see four little-finger-sized holes in and around the back doors, ringed with bright metal where the paint had been blown off.

Forcing open the left-side back door, he had found that the little propane refrigerator had stopped two 9-millimeter slugs, and he had disconnected the appliance and laid the beer and Cokes and sandwich supplies out on the grass to carry in to the apartment; the sink cabinet had a hole punched through it and the sink itself was dented; and a solid ricochet off of the chassis of the field frequency modulator he’d just bought had ripped open one of his pillows, the deformed slug ending up shallowly embedded in the low headboard. One of the back-door windows was holed, and the slug had apparently passed through the interior of the van and exited through the windshield; and one perfectly round, deep dent in the back fender might have been put there by a bullet. And of course the driver’s-side mirror was now a half-dozen fragments dangling from some kind of rubber gasket.

These were the extent of the damage, and he shivered with queasy gratitude when he thought of the boy having been crouched on the van floor in the middle of the fusillade and of Elizalde’s head nearly having been in the way of the one that had punched through the windshield. They had been lucky.

Sullivan had made several trips to the apartment to stack his electronic gear in a corner with Elizalde’s bag of witch fetishes beside it, and put the drinks and the sandwich things into the refrigerator. Finally he had locked the van up and covered the whole vehicle with an unfolded old rust-stained parachute, trying to drape it as neatly as he could in anticipation of Mr. Shadroe’s probable disapproval.

Now he was sitting on a yellow fire hydrant out by the curb across Twenty-first Place, holding one of Houdini’s plaster hands and watching the corner of Ocean Boulevard. There was a bus stop at Cherry, just around the corner. Clouds like chunks of broken concrete were shifting across the sky, and the tone of his thoughts changed with the alternating light and shade.

In shadow: They’ve been caught, Houdini’s thumb can’t deflect the attention the boy was drawing; they’re being tortured, disloyal Angelica is leading bad guys here, I should be farther away from the building so I can hide when I see the terrible Lincolns turn onto Twenty-first Place.

In sunlight: Buses take forever, what with transfers and all, and Angelica is a godsend, how nice to have such challenging and intelligent company if you’ve got to be in a mess like this, even if this séance attempt doesn’t work; and even the kid, Shake Booty or whatever his name is, is probably going to turn out to be interesting.

It’s been an hour just since I came to sit out here, he thought finally—and then he heard a deliberate scuffing on the sidewalk behind him.

His first thought as he hopped off the hydrant and turned around was that he didn’t have his gun—but it was Elizalde and the boy who were walking toward him from the cul-de-sac at the seaward end of Twenty-first. The boy was carrying a big white bag with KFC in red on the side of it.

“You stopped for food?” Sullivan demanded, glancing around even as he stepped forward; he had meant it to sound angry, but he found that he was laughing, and he hugged Elizalde. She returned the hug at first, but then pulled away.

“Sorry,” he said, stepping back himself.

“It’s not you,” she said. “Just use your left arm.”

He clasped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to himself, her head under his chin.

When they turned to walk across the street to the old apartment building, she nodded toward the white plaster hand that Sullivan was holding in his right hand. “I just don’t like strangers’ hands on me,” she said.

“I don’t like people with the wrong number of hands,” said the boy.

Sullivan looked dubiously at the boy, and then at the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag the boy was carrying, and he tried to think of some pun about finger-lickin' good; he couldn’t, and made do with saying, “Let’s get in out of the rain,” though of course it wasn’t raining.

WHEN THEY had got inside the apartment and dead-bolted the door and propped the Houdini hands against it, the boy set the bag on the painted wooden floor and said, “Has either of you two got any medical experience?”

“I’m a doctor,” said Elizalde cautiously. “A real one, an M.D.”

“Excellent.” The boy shrugged carefully out of his torn denim jacket and began stiffly pulling his filthy polo shirt off over his head.

Sullivan raised his eyebrows and glanced at Elizalde. Under the shirt, against his skin, the boy was wearing some kind of belt made of wire cables, with a glowing light at the front.

“What are your names?” came his voice from inside the shirt.

Sullivan was grinning and frowning at the same time. “Peter Sullivan, Your Honor,” he said, sitting down in the corner beside his boxes. He had opened all the windows when he had carried the things in here earlier, but the heat was still turned on full, and the air above about shoulder height was wittingly hot.

“Angelica Elizalde.”

“This kid is—I’m called Koot Hoomie Parganas.” The boy had got the shirt off, and Sullivan could see a bloodstained bandage taped over his ribs on the right side, just above the grotesque belt. “A man cut us with a knife yesterday afternoon. We treated it with high-proof rum, and it doesn’t seem to be infected, but the bleeding won’t quite stop.”

Elizalde knelt in front of him and pulled back the edge of the bandage—the boy’s mouth tightened, but he stood still.

“Well,” said Elizalde in a voice that sounded irritated, even embarrassed, “you ought to have had some stitches. Too late now, you’ll have a dueling scar. But it looks clean enough. We should use something besides liquor to prevent infection, though.”

“Well, fix it right,” Koot Hoomie said. “This is a good little fellow, my boy is, and he’s been put through a lot.”

“‘Fix it right,’” echoed Elizalde, still on her knees beside the boy. She sighed. “Fix it right.” After a pause she shot a hostile glance at Sullivan, and then said, “Peter, would you fetch me a—damn it, an unbroken egg from my grocery bag?”

Wordlessly Sullivan leaned over from where he was sitting and hooked the bag closer to himself, dug around among the herb packets and oil bottles until he found the opened carton of eggs, and lifted one out. He got to his hands and knees to hand it across to her, then sat back down.

“Thank you. Lie down on the floor, please, Kootie.”

Kootie sat down on the wooden floor and then gingerly, stretched out on his back. “Should I take off the belt?”

‘What’s it for?” asked Sullivan quietly.

‘Degaussing,” said Elizalde.

“No,” said Sullivan. “Leave it on.”

Elizalde leaned over the boy and rolled the egg gently over his stomach, around the wound and over the bandage, and in a soft voice she recited, “Sana, sana, cola de rana, tira un pedito para ahora y mañana.” She spoke the words with fastidious precision, like a society hostess picking up fouled ashtrays.

Sullivan shifted uneasily and pushed away the bullet-dented field frequency modulator so that he could lean back against the wall. “You’re sure this isn’t a job for an emergency room?”

Elizalde gave him an opaque stare. “La cura es peor que la enfermedad—the cure would be worse than the injury, he wouldn’t be safe half an hour in any kind of public hospital. Kootie is staying with us. Donde comen dos, comen tres.”

Sullivan was able to work out that that one meant something like “Three can live as cheaply as two.” He thought it was a bad idea, but he shrugged and struggled to his feet, up into the hot air layer, and walked into the open kitchen.

“There you go, Kootie,” he heard Elizalde say. “You can get up now. We’ll bury the egg outside, after the sun goes down.”

Elizalde and the boy were both standing again, and Kootie was experimentally stretching his right arm and wincing.

“Voodoo,” said the boy gruffly. “As useless as the hodgepodge of old radio parts Petey bought.”

Sullivan turned away to open the refrigerator. “Kootie,” he said, pulling a Coors Light out of the depleted twelve-pack carton, “I notice that you refer to yourself in the first person singular, the third person, and the first person plural. Is there a—” He popped the tab and took a deep sip of the beer, raising his eyebrows at, the boy over the top of the can. “—reason for that?”

“That’s beer, isn’t it?” said Kootie, pressing his side and wincing. “Which costs a dollar a can? Aren’t you going to offer any to the lady and me?”

“Angelica,” said Sullivan, “would you like a beer?”

“Just a Coke, please,” she said.

“A Coke for you too, sonny,” Sullivan told Kootie, turning back toward the refrigerator. “You’re too young for beer.”

“I’ll start to answer your question,” said Kootie sternly, “by telling you that one of us is eighty-four years old.”

Sullivan had put down his beer and taken out two cans of Coke. “Well it’s not me, and it’s not you, and I doubt if it’s Angelica. Anyway, you can’t divvy it up among people socialistically that way. You gotta accumulate the age yourself.”

Kootie slapped his bare chest and grinned at him. “I meant one of us. First person plural.”

A knock sounded at the door then, and all three of them jumped. Sullivan had dropped the cans and spun toward the door, but he looked back toward Elizalde when he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 being chambered. An ejected bullet clicked off the wall, for she hadn’t needed to cock it, but it was ready to fire and her thumbs were out of the way of the slide.

He sidled to the window, ready to drop to the floor to give her a clear field of fire, and pushed down one slat of the Venetian blinds.

And he sighed, sagging with relief. “It’s just the landlord,” he whispered, for the window beyond the blinds was open. He wondered if Shadroe had heard the gun being chambered.

Elizalde engaged the safety before shoving the gun back into the fanny-pack holster and zipping it shut.

Sullivan unbolted the door and pulled it open. Gray-haired old Shadroe pushed his way inside even as Sullivan was saying, “Sorry, I’m having some friends over right now—”

“I’m a friend,” Shadroe said grimly. He was wearing no shirt, and his vast suntanned belly overhung his stovepipe-legged shorts. His squinty eyes took in Elizalde and Kootie, and then fixed on Sullivan. “Your name’s Peter Sullivan” he said, slowly, as if he meant to help Sullivan learn the syllables by heart. “It was on the… rental agreement.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a common enough name—” Shadroe paused to inhale. “Wouldn’t you have thought so yourself?”

“Yes…?” said Sullivan, mystified.

“Well, not today. I’m your godbrother.”

Sullivan wondered how far away the nearest liquor store might be. “I suppose so, Mr. Shadroe, but you and I are going to have to discuss God and brotherhood later, okay? Right now I’m—”

Shadroe pointed one grimy finger at the also-shirtless Kootie. “It’s him, isn’t it? My pigs were—starting to smoke. I had to pull the batteries out of ‘em—and I sent my honey pie to my boat—to take the batteries out of the pigs aboard there. Burn the boat down, otherwise.” He turned an angrily earnest gaze on Sullivan. “I want you all,” he said. “To come to my office, and see. What your boy has done to my television set.”

Sullivan was shaking his head, exhaustion and impatience propelling him toward something like panic. Shadroe reeked of cinnamon again, and his upper lip was dusted with brown powder, as if he’d been snorting Nestle’s Quik, and Sullivan wondered if the crazy old man would even hear anything he might say.

“The boy hasn’t been out of this room,” Sullivan said loudly and with exaggerated patience. “Whatever’s wrong with your TV—”

“Is it ‘godbrother’?” Shadroe interrupted. “What I mean is, your father” Sullivan coughed in disgust and tried to think of the words to convince Shadroe that Sullivan was not his son, but the old man raised his hand for silence. “Was my godfather” he went on, completing his sentence. “My real name is Nicholas Bradshaw. Loretta deLarava is after my. Ass.”

Sullivan realized that he had been almost writhing with insulted impatience, and that he was now absolutely still. “Oh,” he said into the silence of the room. “Really?” He studied the old man’s battered, pouchy face, and with a chill realized that this could very well be Nicholas Bradshaw. “Jesus. Uh…how’ve you been?”

“Not so good,” said Bradshaw heavily. “I died in 1975.”

The statement rocked Sullivan, who had not even been completely convinced that the man was dead, and in any case had only been supposing that he’d been dead for a year or two at the most.

“Amanita phalloides mushrooms,” Bradshaw said, “in a salad I ate. You have bad abdominal seizures twelve…hours after you eat it. Phalloidin, one of the several poisons. In the mushrooms. And then you feel fine for a week or two. DeLarava called me during the week. Couldn’t help gloating. It was too late by then—for me to do anything. Alpha-amanitine already at work. So I got all my money in cash, and hid it. And then I got very drunk, on my boat. Very drunk. Tore up six telephones, ate the magnets—to keep my ghost in. And I climbed into the refrigerator.” His stressful breathing was filling the hot living room with the smell of cinnamon and old garbage. “A week later, I climbed out—dead, but still up and walking.”

Elizalde walked to the kitchen counter, put down the egg, and picked up Sullivan’s beer. After she had tipped it to her lips and drained it, she dropped the can to clang on the floor, and held out her right hand. “I’m Angelica Anthem Elizalde,” she said. “The police are after my ass.”

Shadroe shook her hand, grinning squintingly at Sullivan. “I’m gonna steal your señoriter, Peter,” he said, his solemnity apparently forgotten. “What are you people doing here? Hiding here? I won’t have that. You’ll lead deLarava and the police to me and my honey pie.” He was still smiling, still shaking Elizalde’s hand. “Your van is an eyesore, even under the parachute. I can’t understand people who have no pride at all.”

Sullivan blinked at the man’s random-fire style, but gathered that he was on the verge of being evicted. He tried to remember Nicky Bradshaw, who had been a sort of remote older cousin when Pete and Elizabeth had been growing up. Their father had always seemed to like Nicky, and of course had got him the Spooky part in “Ghost of a Chance.”

“Listen to me, Nicky, we’re going to try to build an apparatus; set up a séance, to talk to dead people, to ghosts,” he said quickly. “To get specific ones, clearly, not the whole jabbering crowd. I want to talk to my father, to warn him that deLarava is devoting all her resources to finding him and eating him, tomorrow, on Halloween.”

And then an idea burst into Sullivan’s head, and suddenly he thought the séance scheme might work after all. “You should be the one to talk to him, Nicky, to warn him—he always liked you!” Sullivan’s heart was still pounding. I might need to buy another part or two, he thought excitedly. This changes everything.

“You should talk to him yourself, Peter,” said Elizalde, who was standing beside him.

“No no,” Sullivan said eagerly, “the main thing here isn’t what I’d prefer, it’s what will work! This is a huge stroke of luck! He’ll listen to Nicky more seriously than he’d listen to me, Nicky’s twelve years older than I am. Aren’t you, Nicky? He always took you seriously.”

Bradshaw just stared at him, looking in fact a hundred years old these days. “I’d like to talk to him,” he said. “But you should be the one—to warn him. You’re his son.” “And he’s your father,” Elizalde said.

Sullivan didn’t look at her. “That’s not the point here,” he snapped impatiently,. “what matters—”

“And,” Elizalde went on, almost gently, “Nicky presumably isn’t linked to your father by a consuming guilt, the way you clearly are.”

“You’re the antenna,” agreed Kootie. “The variable capacitor that’s fused at the right frequency adjustment.”

Sullivan clenched his fists, and he could feel his face getting red. “But the machinery won’t work if it’s—”

For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was a faint fizzing from one of the cans of Coke that he’d dropped when Bradshaw had knocked on the door. Sullivan’s forehead was misted with sweat. You re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, he thought, you won’t dissolve.

“You weren’t going to do it,” said Elizalde, smiling. “You were going to go through the motions, set it all up so plausibly that nobody, certainly not yourself, could accuse you of not having done your best. But there was going to be some factor that you were going to forget, something no one could blame you for not having thought of.”

Sullivan’s chest was hollow with dismayed wonderment. “A condensing lens,” he said softly.

“A condensing lens?” said Kootie. “Like in a movie projector, between the carbon arc and the aperture?”

Sullivan ignored him.

Without a condensing lens set up between the Langmuir gauge and the brush discharge in the carborundum bulb, the signal couldn’t possibly be picked up by the quartz filament inside the gauge.

But wouldn’t he have thought of that, as soon as he saw the weakness and dispersion of the flickering blue brush sparks in the bulb? Even if Elizalde hadn’t said what she had just said?

In this moment of unprepared insight, while his bones shivered with an icy chill in spite of the hot air and the sweat on his face, he was bleakly sure he would not have thought of it, or would at least have contrived to set the lens up incorrectly. He wouldn’t be able to do it wrong now, now that he was aware of the temptation. But maybe it still won’t work! The thought was almost a prayer.

Kootie limped forward and held his right hand up to Bradshaw. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “I’m two people at the moment—one of ’em is known as Kootie—”

“That’s an I-ON-A-CO belt you got on,” said Bradshaw, shaking the boy’s hand “They don’t work. You got it from Wilshire?”

“We were on Wilshire,” said the boy in a surprised tone, and it occurred to Sullivan that this was the first time the voice had really sounded like a little boy’s “Right by MacArthur Park!”

“I meant H. Gaylord Wilshire himself,” said Bradshaw. “That was his original tract. From Park View to Benton, and Sixth down to Seventh. My godfather bought one of those fool belts. From him, in the twenties. What’s old man Wilshire like these days?”

“Insubstantial,” said the boy, and his voice was controlled and hard again. “But I didn’t get to introduce my other self.” He looked around at the other three people in the room. “I’m Thomas Alva Edison,” he said, “and I promise you I can get your ghost telephone working, even if Petey here can’t.”

Sullivan was relieved that everyone was staring at the boy now, and he went back to the refrigerator and took the second-last beer and popped it open. I shouldn’t have said condensing lens, he thought bitterly. I should have blinked at her in surprise, and then acted insulted. Edison. I’m sure. No doubt the kid is a ghost, or has one on him, but I’ll bet every ghost that knows anything about electricity claims to have been Thomas Edison.

“Cart all your crap to my office,” said Bradshaw wearily. “You can set up your gizmo there. It’s the most masked room in this whole masked block. Electric every which way, water running uphill and roundabout—even hologram pictures in a saltwater aquarium under black light. And bring your bag of fried chicken, Mr. Edison—Johanna loves that stuff. Did you get Original Recipe—or the new crunchy stuff?”

“Original Recipe,” said Elizalde over her shoulder as she stepped past Sullivan and opened the refrigerator.

“Good,” said Bradshaw. “That’s what she likes. I hope you brought enough.”

AN HOUR later Sullivan was sitting cross-legged on the dusty rug in Bradshaw’s dim office, staring idly at the featureless white glow of the old man’s TV screen and gnawing a cold chicken wing.

Bradshaw’s “honey pie,” a heavy young woman in tight leotards and a baggy wool sweater, had burst in shortly after they’d carried all the supplies to the office, and after the introductions (Johanna, this is Thomas Edison—Mr. Edison, my honey pie Johanna) she had told Bradshaw that “the pigs on the boat were just burping, not smoking yet.”

After that, Johanna and Elizalde had gone out again in Bradshaw’s car to buy supplies—bandages, hydrogen peroxide, a secondhand portable movie projector, a pint of tequila for Elizalde, more beer and more Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a box of sidewalk chalk, which Kootie had insisted on.

When they had got back Elizalde had cleaned the cut in Kootie’s side and secured it with the bandages and put on a more expert-looking dressing, and then they had i torn open the KFC bags.

The chicken was now gone, and Sullivan had had several of the beers. He tossed the chicken bone onto his newspaper place mat and took a sip of his latest beer. “Angelica,” he said, “could you pass me that muffin?” Elizalde looked at him coldly. “Why do you call it a muffin?” He stared back at her. “Well, it’s…a little round thing made out of dough.” “So’s your head, but I don’t call it a muffin. This is a roll.” She picked it up and leaned across the newspapers to hold it out. “Don’t get drunk for this,” she added. “Keep the roll,” he said. “I had my heart set on a muffin.”

“I wish I could get drunk,” said Bradshaw grumpily. He had crunched up a succession of red cinnamon balls as the others had passed around the chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, and now he poured himself another glass of whatever it was that he was drinking—some red fluid that also reeked of cinnamon. “My pigs and TV are useless while Mr. Edison’s here.”

Sullivan had decided not to ask about the smoking pigs, but he waved his beer at the white-glowing television. “What’re you watching?”

“Channel Two,” said Bradshaw, “CBS, my old alma mater.”

Til bet I could mess with it and get you a better picture.” Sullivan felt tightly tensed, as if any move he made would break something in the cluttered office.

“It’s not on for the picture,” wheezed Bradshaw. “Ghosts are an electrical brouhaha in the fifty-five-megahertz range—and Channel Two is the—closest channel to that. The brightness control on that set is—turned all the way to black, right now—believe it or not.”

“That’s awfully shortwave,” commented the boy who claimed to be Edison. “You’re a shortwave critter,” Bradshaw said. “And a damn big one. Even if you were a dozen miles away—you’d still show up—on the screen here as a—white band. But standing here you’re hogging the whole show. We could have the ghost of—goddamn Godzilla standing right outside, and I wouldn’t have a clue.” “Don’t you people have a telephone to build?” asked Elizalde. Sullivan looked irritably across the newspapers at her—but then with a flush of sympathy he realized that she was as tense as he was. He remembered how she had bravely pretended to be eager to go witchcraft-shopping this morning, when he had been ready to sit holed up in the apartment all weekend; and for a moment, before he sighed and got to his feet, he felt a flicker of pitying love for her, and of disgust with himself.

“Yeah,” he said. “Household current should be enough—I bought a train-set transformer, and there’s the Ford coil.”

Elizalde had got up too, and was lifting candles and herb packets and tiny bottles of oil out of her shopping bag.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Kootie, who was sitting crouched like a bird up on the back of the old couch. “Let’s be speedy, it’s less than twelve hours to midnight, and I want to be clathrated damn deep, out of range of any magnets, when church bells are ringing the first strokes of Halloween.”

“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you won’t dissolve! I’ll race you into the water!” It had been a man’s voice that had said it, calling happily. Sullivan remembered the two Coke cans he had dropped on the floor back in the apartment, and he didn’t want to remember whose voice it had been that had said, “I’ll race you into the water!”

“A bulb with a carborundum button instead of a filament,” he said loudly, “charged, with the eventual brush of electric discharge…focused through a goddamn condensing lens…onto the quartz filament, which we’ll blacken with soot, inside a Langmuir gauge. It’ll work like the vanes in a radiometer, wiggle in response to the light coming through the lens. We can break a thermometer to get a drop of mercury to put in the gauge, and then we can evacuate it to a good enough rarefication with a hose connected to the sink faucet….”

But the twins had been feeling nauseated ever since eating the potato salad at lunch, and were queasy even at the smell of the Coppertone lotion, and they had decided to stay out of the surf and just lie on the towels, on the solid bumpy mattress of the sand.

Kootie had been listening as Sullivan had been describing his proposed device, and he now interrupted: “You don't want a magnet in the receiver. This is such a sensitive thing you’re talking about that an actual magnet in the same room would draw the voices of all the ghosts in Los Angeles. We’ll have enough trouble with fields caused by the changing electrical charges. Use chalk, I had the ladies buy some.” He paused, and then said, “We still have some of the Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, Mr Edison. That won’t do, Kootie, this has to be round, like a cylinder. Good thought, though.”

“Chalk?” asked Sullivan, trying to concentrate.

Their father had shrugged, and his remark about Speedy Alka-Seltzer had hung in the air as he turned away from them, toward the foam-streaked waves, and young Pete had been able to see the frail white hair on the backs of his father’s shoulders fluffing in the ocean breeze.

“The friction of a piece of wet chalk varies with changes in its electric charge,” Kootie said. “Without a charge it’s toothy and has lots of friction, but it’s instantly slick when there’s a current….”

The three cans of Hires Root Beer were laid out like artillery shells, awaiting their father’s return from his swim. There was one for him, and one each for Pete and Elizabeth. Their stepmom had explained that she didn’t drink soda pop, so there were only three cans.

“…A spring connected to the center of the diaphragm,” Kootie was saying, drawing with his hands in the stale dim air, “with the other end pressed against the side of the rotating chalk cylinder. The fluctuations in the current from your Ford coil will change the mechanical resistance of the chalk, so the needle will wiggle, you see, as the chalk rapidly changes from slick to scratchy, and the wiggle will be conveyed to the diaphragm.”

“It sounds goofy,” quavered Sullivan, forcing himself to pay attention to what Kootie was saying, and not to the intrusive, unstoppable, intolerably resurrected memory.

“It works,” said Kootie flatly. “A young man named George Bernard Shaw happened to be working for me in London in ‘79, and maybe you’ve read his description of my electromotograph receiver in his book The Irrational Knot.”

Sullivan shivered, for he was suddenly sure that the ghost this boy carried was, in fact, Thomas Edison. Sullivan’s voice was humble as he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

But he didn’t add, “sir.” Aside from police officers, there was only one man he had ever called “sir.”

Their stepmother didn’t even bother to act very surprised when Pete and Elizabeth screamed at her that their father was in trouble out in the water. The old man had swum out through the waves in his usual briskly athletic Australian crawl, but he was floundering and waving now, way out beyond the surf line, and their stepmother had only got to her feet and shaded her eyes to watch.

“…and the carborundum bulb should be sensitive enough to pick the ghost up, and reflect his presence in the brush discharge. He should easily be able to vary it, so it’s a signal that’s going through the lens into the Langmuir viscosity gauge…” Sullivan blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes.

Their stepmother hadn’t eaten any of the potato salad, and she seemed to be fine; but she wouldn’t even take one step across the dry sand toward the water, and so the twins had gone running down to the surf all by themselves, even though cramps were wringing their stomachs. …

Kootie had asked Sullivan a question, and he struggled to remember what it had been. “Oh,” he said finally, “right. We’ll have primed the quartz filament with a ground vibration, set it ringing by waving a magnet past the little swiveling iron armature in the gauge, and then I guess we get rid of the magnet, outside the building. The quartz starts from a peak tone, and then the vibration will damp down as the quartz loses its initial’its initial ping. We’ll gradually lose volume, but even with the damping radiometer effects of the signal it’s getting from the focused light, and from friction with the trace of mercury gas in the gauge, the sustaining vibration should last a good while.”

Both of the twins had paused when they were chest deep and wobbling on tiptoe in the cold, surging water. But Elizabeth let the buoyancy take her, and began dog-paddling out toward their distant suffering father; while Pete, frightened of the deep water that was frightening their father, and of the clenching pain in his abdomen, had turned and floundered back toward shore.

“You’re the antenna,” said Kootie, who was now looking down at him curiously from his perch on the couch back, “but you’ll need a homing beacon too, a lure.”

And after a while Elizabeth had dragged herself back, exhausted and sick and alone.

“I’m that as well,” said Sullivan bleakly. “I’m still his son.”

They had not of course opened the three Hires cans, though the twins were destined to glimpse the cans again twenty-seven years later…again in Venice.

And Sullivan’s face went cold—the memory of Kelley Keith’s face blandly observing the drowning of her husband had overlaid memories of deLarava’s face, and at long, long last he realized that they were the same woman.

“Nicky!” he said, so unsteadily that Elizalde shot him a look of spontaneous concern. “Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith!”

“Shoot,” said Bradshaw. “I’ve known that since 1962.”

“When we were ten? You could have told us!”

“You’d have wanted to go back to her?”

Sullivan remembered the pretty young face looking speculatively out at the old man drowning beyond the waves. “Jesus, no.”

“She killed your father,” said Bradshaw. “Just like she killed me. And now she wants to erase both guilts. Both reproaches, both awarenesses. If we’re gone, see, it can be not true. For her.”

“She; no, he drowned, she didn’t kill him—”

“She fed you and your sister and your father. Poisoned potato salad. All in the golden afternoon.”

Kootie bounced impatiently down off the couch, and as he began pacing the floor he picked up Sullivan’s pack of Marlboros. Now he shook one out and, with it hanging on his lower lip, slapped his pants pockets. “Somebody got a match?”

“It’s the kid’s lungs!” protested Elizalde.

“One cigarette?” said Kootie’s voice. “I hardly think—It’s all right, Mrs. Elizalde, I’ve smoked Marlboros before. Really? Well, she’s right, you shouldn’t. Don’t let me catch you with one of these in your hand again!” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the pack. “You started it, you were working my hands. Don’t argue with your elders, the lady was right. I was out of line… dammit.” He turned a squinting gaze on Sullivan. “I think your plan will work. It’s better than mine was, in some ways. I like the carborundum bulb to focus just the one signal—it just might eliminate the party-line crowd. Let’s get busy.”

Bradshaw volunteered to clear off the top of his desk, and soon Kootie and Sullivan were laying out globes and boxes and wires across the scarred mahogany surface. Bradshaw even dragged a couple of old rotary-dial telephones out of a cupboard for them to cannibalize. Twice Sullivan went out to the van, once for tools and once to disconnect and tote back the battery so as to have some solid 12-volt direct current and at one point, while he was doing some fast, penciled calculations on the desktop, Elizalde stepped up behind him and briefly squeezed his shoulder. She’d been intermittently busy with something in the little added-on kitchen, and the stale cinnamon air in the office was getting sharp with the steamy fumes of mint and hot tequila.

As his fingers and brain followed the inevitable chessboard logic of potentials and resistances and magnetic fields, Sullivan’s mind was a ringing ground zero after the detonation of his hitherto-entombed memories, with frightened thoughts darting among the raw, broken ruins of his psyche.

I was there when he drowned! The Christmas shoot in ‘86 was not the first time I was ever at Venice Beach—no wonder I kept seeing deja-vu sunlit overlays of the Venice scene projected onto those gray winter streets and sidewalks. I had been there when he drowned on that summer day in ‘59, and Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith, our stepmother, and she killed him, she poisoned him and watched my father die! I was there—I watched my father die! At least Sukie tried to swim out and save him—I gave up, ran away, back to the towels.

O car-bolic faithless, he sang in his head, echoing Sukie’s old misremembered Christmas carol.

He was suddenly sure that Sukie had all along remembered some of that day, possibly a lot of it. Her drinking C What you can’t remember cant hurt you)“, her celibacy, and her final feverish attempt to force Pete into bed and have sex with him after he had confronted her with the lies she had told to Judy Nording—even her eventual suicide—must, it seemed to him now as he screwed the Ford coil onto the surface of the desk, have been results of her remembering that day.

By midafternoon the assembly had been wired and screwed down and propped up across the desktop, and the carborundum bulb was plugged in. Edison pointed out that when the evacuated bulb warmed up, the line of its brushy interior discharge would be sensitive to the motion of any person in the room, so they ran wires around the doorway and into Bradshaw’s little fluorescent-lit kitchen, and set up the chalk-cylinder speaker assembly on the counter by the sink, with a rewired old telephone on a TV table in the middle of the floor. Sullivan had ceremoniously slid a kitchen chair up in front of it.

Elizalde had made a steaming, eye-watering tea of mint leaves and tequila in a saucepan on the old white-enameled stove, and had turned off the flame when all the liquid had boiled away and the leaves had cooked nearly dry. She and Johanna were standing by the stove, hemmed in by the wires trailing across the worn linoleum floor.

Elizalde’s eyes were big and empty when she looked up at Sullivan, and he thought he must look the same way. “When you’re ready,” she said, “Johanna and I will go light the candles in the other room, and splash the vente aquí oil around. Then we should disconnect any smoke alarms, and I’ll turn on this stove burner again, high, under this pot of yerra vuena. You want to be talking into the smoke from it.”

Sullivan had been making sure to take each emptied beer can to the trash before furtively opening the next, so that Elizaide wouldn’t be able to count them. O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion, he sang shrilly in his head.

He took the latest beer into the office, which was very dark now that Bradshaw had unplugged the television set and carried it out to one of the garages, and he pried the can open quietly as he checked the discharge in the carborundum bulb. The bulb had indeed warmed up, and the ghostly blue wisp of electrons was curling against the inside of the glass, silently shifting its position as he moved across the carpet.

“I guess we’re ready,” he said, sidling back into the bright lit kitchen past Bradshaw, who was standing in the doorway.

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

“She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

I don’t remember the old man’s number,” Bradshaw said. “We could call the reference desk at a library, from a regular phone, I guess.”

“I know the number,” said Sullivan.

Running and running, he thought, running with Sukie since 1959, and then running extra fast and alone since 1986. All over the country. To wind up here, now, in this shabby kitchen, staring at a gutted old black bakelite telephone. “It’s April Fool’s Day, 1898.”

He looked at Elizalde. “My father’s birthday. That and his full name will be his telephone number.” He looked down at the rotary dial on the telephone. The old man would be summoned by dialing April the first, 1898, A-RT-H-U-R—P-A-T-R-I-C-K—S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N.

Slowly, looking at the rotary dial, he read off, “411898, 278487-7287425-78554826.”

“A lot of numbers,” said Kootie, and Sullivan thought it might actually be the boy talking.

“It’s very long distance,” he said.

“I remember I always thought God’s phone number was Et cum spiri 2-2-oh,” said Elizalde nervously. “From the Latin mass, you know? Et cum spiritu tuo.”

“You can call Him after I’m done talking to my dad.”

“Can magical calls out of here be traced?” asked Bradshaw suddenly.

Kootie cleared his throat. “Sure,” he said. The boy was sitting up on the kitchen counter beside the chalk cylinder, which had been mounted on the stripped frame of an electric pencil sharpener; he was pale, and his narrow chest was rising and falling visibly. Sweat was running in shiny lines down over his stomach, and the bandage over his ribs on the right side was spotted with fresh blood. “You’ve got—what, three? four?—antennas sitting around in this kitchen, and they do broadcast as well as receive.”

“Don’t worry, Nicky,” said Sullivan, “we’ll use a scrambler. Angelica, could I have Houdini's thumb?” When she had dug the thing out of her shoe and passed it to him, he laid it on the table beside the telephone. “We can dial with this.”

“It would be good if we could make a test call first,” Kootie said thoughtfully. “Anybody got any dead people they got to get a message to?”

Visibly tensing before she moved, Elizalde stepped forward away from the stove, placing her sneakers carefully among the looped wires, and sat down in the chair. “There’s a guy I took money from,” she said steadily, “and I didn’t do the work he paid for.”

Kootie hopped down from the counter. “You know his number?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ll need a lure,” he said, “remember? A ‘homing beacon.’”

She leaned sideways to pull her wallet out of her hip pocket, and then she dug a tattered, folded note out of it. “This is in his handwriting,” she said. “His emotional handwriting.” She looked over at Johanna by the stove. “Could you light the candles and…smear the oil over the door lintel, or whatever’s required?”

“Better than you, maybe,” said Johanna with a merry smile.

Elizalde looked at Sullivan. “Drop the dime.”

He was grateful to her for going first. “Okay. Kootie, turn up that fire.”

Sullivan stepped past Bradshaw into the dark office, and while Johanna struck matches to the candles on the shelves and shook out the oil and muttered rhymes under her breath, he dug out of his pocket the magnet they had pulled from the old telephone. He crouched beside the upright Langmuir gauge and waved the magnet past the tiny iron armature, and heard the faint contained ting as it rocked against the dangling quartz filament. Then he opened the outside door, sprinted out through the glaring sunlight to the covered van and set the magnet down on the asphalt beside it.

Seven seconds later he was back in the kitchen, panting in the hot fumes of cinnamon and mint.

Kootie had connected the modified pencil sharpener, and the speaker was resonating with a flat sound like a sustained exhalation; the mint in the saucepan was steaming and sputtering.

Elizalde took the receiver off the hook, then picked up Houdini’s thumb and began dialing the telephone; somehow the speaker behind her made a fluttering sound in synchronization with the rattle of the dial. Belatedly Sullivan realized that privacy would not be possible here, and he took a hasty sip of the beer to cool his heated face.

Elizalde was still dialing numbers into the telephone, but already a whispering voice was rasping out of the speaker.

“Cosa mala nunca muere,” it said. “Me entiendes, Mendez?”

Sullivan felt moving air on his sweaty scalp at the back of his head, and he realized that his hair was actually standing on end.

“It’s the damned crowd effect,” said Kootie irritably, “that can’t be your man yet.” He frowned at Elizalde. “Do you recognize this voice?” Then Kootie’s eyes were wide, and he spoke with a scared boy’s intonation: “It’s that laughing bag!”

Elizalde’s hand sprang away from the dial, and Houdini’s thumb landed in the sink. “Jesus, he’s right,” she said. “The cloth bag in the truck bed!”

Sullivan didn’t know what they were talking about.

“What did it just say?”

“It said, a—a bad thing never dies,” said Elizalde rapidly, hugging herself, “and then it said, ‘You understand?’” She threw Sullivan a frightened look. “Can’t I quit this and just go away?”

He spread his hands. “Can’t I?” he asked, really hoping that she would find some way to say yes.

But she was rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands; and then she said, “Could you bring that thumb back here?”

As Sullivan stepped over to the sink, Bradshaw growled, “Is this somebody you two (gasp) tracked in on your shoes?” The mint leaves in the pot on the fire were smoking and popping now.

Kootie shrugged. “It’s…yes, something, somebody, that was paying attention to me this morning, and it would have seen Mrs. Elizalde.”

“Miss,” said Elizalde.

“Let a dead guy clear the line for you,” Shadroe said. He stumped into the kitchen—carelessly stepping all over the wires, his bare belly swinging ahead of him—and he took the receiver and blew sharply into the mouthpiece. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?” Then he dialed Operator, twice.

He set the receiver back down beside the telephone. “Try it now.”

Sullivan had fetched the thumb, and handed it to her, and she began shakily dialing again. It took nearly a full minute for her to dial all the numbers of her man’s birth date and full name, but Bradshaw's breath had apparently chased away any stray ghosts.

At last she was finished dialing, and she hesitantly picked up the receiver.

A musical buzz sounded from the speaker by the sink; it stopped, and then began again, stopped, and began again.

“My God,” said Sullivan softly. “It’s ringing!”

“Cultural conditioning,” muttered Kootie. “It’s what everybody expects, even the man she’s calling.”

“Who is that?” came a startled voice from the speaker, and Sullivan was peripherally impressed with the fidelity of Edison’s chalk speaker.

“Frank?” said Elizalde into the mouthpiece. “It’s me, it’s Angelica.”

“Angelica!” The initial surprise in the voice gave way to petulance: “Angelica, where are you? Who is this old man?”

Sullivan saw Elizalde glance bewilderedly from Bradshaw to Kootie. “Who do you mean, Frank?”

“He comes in your clinic every day! He does the séances all wrong, reading palms of people’s hands, and. …taking liberties with the pretty women!”

“Oh, that would be—that’s not my clinic anymore, Frank, I don’t—”

“I saw you today, from here, from the window. You fell on the curb when I saw you coming. I live here, and I waved, but you didn’t come in.”

“I’m sorry, Frank, I—”

“You didn’t come in—you don’t respect me anymore—you never did respect me! I didn’t speak to you in the sewer, and I shouldn’t speak to you now. You didn’t come visit me after I hurt myself in your clinic. You have other boyfriends now, in your fine house, and you’ve never once thought of me.”

Elizalde’s face was contorted, but her voice was strong. “Frank,” she said, “I failed you. I’m sorry. Do you remember why you came to my clinic, why you were sent there?”

“Uh…well, because I always had to keep checking over and over again if my shoes were tied and if I locked doors and turned off the headlights on my car, even in the daytime—and I went to bed and didn’t came out for a month—and I tried to kill myself. And then after I got out of the hospital they said I should be your outpatient.”

“I failed to help you, and I’m terribly sorry. I haven’t had any boyfriends. I’ve been hiding, running. And every day I’ve been thinking about what I did to you, how I let you down, and wishing I could go back and make it right.”

“You can make it right—right now! We can get married, like I said in my note—”

The mint had flared up in the pan. Sullivan took the pan off the fire and clanged the lid onto it for a moment to snuff the flames.

“No, Frank,” said Elizalde. “You’re dead now. I think you know that, don’t you? Things like marriage are behind you now. You didn’t hurt yourself in my clinic that night, you killed yourself. You remember when you went to bed and stayed there for a month—you weren’t supposed to relax yet, then, it wasn’t time for that yet. It’s time now. You’re dead. Go to sleep, and sleep so deeply that…there won’t be room or light for any dreams.”

For several long seconds the kitchen was silent except for the background hissing of the speaker, and Sullivan saw Kootie glance speculatively at the spinning chalk cylinder.

Then the voice came back. “I’ve thought I might be dead”, it said quietly. “Are you sure, Angelica?”

“I am sure. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve thought about me? Been sorry?”

“You’ve been behind all the thoughts I’ve had. I came back here to ask you to forgive me.”

“Ah.” Again there was silence for a few seconds. “Goodbye, Angelica. Vaya con Dios.”

“Do you forgive me?”

The hissing went on for a full minute before Bradshaw shifted his weight on his feet and cleared his throat; and finally the speaker began making a dull rattle, which ceased when Elizalde reached out and pressed the hang-up button on the telephone cradle.

Sullivan tipped up his can of beer to avoid having to meet anyone’s eye, and he could hear Bradshaw’s knees creak as he shifted his weight again. The mint smoke was billowing thickly under the low ceiling.

Elizalde pushed back the chair and stood up. “I fucking don’t—” she began in a choking voice—

And the musical buzz started up from the speaker by the sink; it stopped, and then started again.

She bent to snatch up the receiver again. “Hello?”

From the chalk-and-pencil-sharpener speaker behind her a cultured man’s voice said, “Could I speak to Don Jay, please?”

“That’s for me,” said Kootie, stepping forward and sitting down in the chair. Elizalde mutely handed him the receiver. He cleared his throat. “This is Thomas Edison,” he said.

The voice on the speaker exhaled sharply. “For God’s sake, this is an open line! Use elementary caution, will you? My son—”

“—Is safe,” said Kootie. His face was composed, but tears had begun to run down his cheeks. “We’ve got the line masked and deviled on this end.”

“God, and you’re speaking physically! With his voice! What—in hell—did we do?” Louder now, the voice called, “Kootie! Can you hear me, boy?”

Kootie’s reddening face relaxed into a grimace and he burst into tears. “I’m here, Dad, but don’t yell or—or the speaker might break, we’ve got it hooked up to a pencil sharpener. Mr. Edison is taking good care of me, don’t worry. But Dad! Tell Mom I didn’t mean to do it! I’m the one that should be dead! I tried to tell you before, but you were b-both d-d-drunk!” His head was down and his stiff poise was gone, and he was just sobbing.

Elizalde got on her knees beside him and put her arm around his bare narrow shoulders and rocked him gently.

“Boy, boy,” said the voice on the speaker shakily, “we’re fragmented here, we blur and break, and some of the pieces you talk to may be minimal. Your mother has gone on ahead, and perhaps has…found the white light, who knows? She told me to make you understand that she loves you, and I love you, and you were…”—the voice was still loud, but blurring—“mot to vlame for what haphened. Ee-bay areful-kay. Isten-lay oo-tay Om-Tay…”

Gradually the hissing background had been becoming textured with clinking and mumbling, and Sullivan thought he heard a voice in the middle distance say, Te explico, Federico?

“I love you!—Dad?” said Kootie loudly into the receiver; then he fumbled at the telephone until he had found and pushed the disconnect button. The speaker clicked and resonated hollowly, and faintly a woman’s voice said, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up, and dial again.”

Elizalde helped Kootie out of the chair, and to Sullivan she seemed to be hurrying the weeping boy, clearing the way so that he could finally call his father. She’s a psychiatrist, Sullivan thought. She probably figures this is all good therapy, all this awful idiot pathos.

As he sat down on the warmed chair seat he noticed that Edison was letting Kootie cry, not taking over the boy’s body again. Sullivan frowned—he knew the fused quartz filament would hold its initial vibration for quite a while in the rarefied mercury-vapor atmosphere inside the gauge, but it had to be picking up noise, random interference, to judge by the way the crowd effect kept creeping in.

But there was nothing Edison would have been able to do about it. At least the speaker was giving out only an even hiss right now.

Sullivan held out his open palm like a surgeon in the middle of an operation. “Thumb?”

Over Kootie’s shaking shoulder, Elizalde gave him a glance of exhausted pique. “Thumb,” she said, slapping Houdini’s black thumb into his hand.

Sullivan began dialing. Hide, hide, he thought, the cow’s outside? Or, Dad, I’m sorry I wasn’t out there treading water beside you, even if it would just have been to drown with you. Or simply, Dad, where have you been? What on earth am I supposed to do now?

He dialed the last numbers of SULLIVAN and laid the thumb down.

The speaker beside the sink buzzed as the woman’s voice came back on the line. “What number were you trying to reach?”

Her tone was palpably sarcastic now—and with a sudden emptiness in his chest he realized that, for the second time in four days, he was talking on the telephone to his twin sister, Sukie.

Impulsively he replied in a falsetto imitation of Judy Garland: “Oh, Auntie Em, I’m frightened!”

And Sukie came back quickly enough to override his last couple of syllables with “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” in the sneering tones of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Sullivan sneaked a glance to the side. Everyone in the smoky kitchen, including fat Johanna in the office doorway, was staring at him; even Kootie had stopped crying in order to gape.

“He put her in a Leyden jar,” Sukie went on in a singsong voice, “and there he kept her near yet jar.”

What? thought Sullivan bewideredly. Put who in a Leyden jar? Auntie Em, in that crystal ball in the movie? A Leyden jar was an early kind of capacitor for storing a static electric charge. “What the hell, Sukie?” he said.

“This root beer will not pass away, Pete. Have you drained it yet?”

“—Yes.” The blood was thudding in his ears, and he felt as though he were standing behind his own body, leaning over its defeat-slumped shoulder. “At least you swam out.”

“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. You should have drank more.

“‘We are but older children, dear,

Who fret to find our bedtime near.’”

“That’s from Alice,” said Sullivan.

“Through the Looking-Glass, actually” Sukie said. “Why do—you all—quote those books so much?”

“They’re not nonsense here, Pete. The little girl who falls down the deep well that’s lined with bookshelves and pictures—call it ‘your whole life flashing before your eyes’—the collapse of all the events of your timeline, down to an idiot unlocated point that occupies no space—the Alice books are an automortography. And then you’re in a place ‘where your…‘physical size’ is a wildly irrational variable, and distance and speed are problematical. And you can’t help but go among mad people.”

The volume was perceptibly diminishing; the vibrations of the quartz filament in the Langmuir gauge in the other room were becoming increasingly randomized. “I—” said Sullivan, “wanted to talk to Dad, actually….”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you, actually. You’re just going to have to be a little soldier about this. Lewis Carroll wasn’t dead, but he knew a little girl who did die—he had taken photographs of her, and he caught her ghost in a Leyden jar, just like Ben Franklin used to do. She told Lewis Carroll all those stories, and he wrote ‘em down” She paused then, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. “You’re probably looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, aren’t you?”

Sullivan was. (He felt even further removed from his seated body than he had a few minutes ago, and he knew that, if Elizalde refused to give him back the .45, he could easily find something else—hell, he could walk in two minutes from here to the ocean, and just swim out.) His father had not forgotten nor forgiven. Over the reeks of burnt mint and Bradshaw’s cinnamon-and-rot breath and his own beery sour sweat, Sullivan could smell Copper tone lotion and mayonnaise and the terrible sea. “If you care,” he whispered.

“I’ve got to take a moment to say…good. But! It’s just that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone over this open line, Pete. He wants you to go pick him up. He says Nicky Bradshaw will know where he is, he has apparently dreamed about Nicky. Dream a little dream of me…not.” Her voice was definitely fading now.

“Beth,” he said loudly, “I ran away from you too, can you—” At the same time she was saying, “I worked hard to ruin your whole life, Pete, can you—”With their old skill of each knowing what the other was about to say, they paused—Sullivan smiled, and he thought that Sukie was smiling somewhere too—and then they said, in perfect unison, “Forgive me?”

After a pause, “How could I possibly not?” they both said.

Sukie’s voice faded away into the increasing hiss of the speaker; for a few seconds everyone in the kitchen heard a dog barking somewhere deep in the amplified abyss, and then the roaring hiss was all there was.

For some reason Kootie whispered “Fred?” and began crying again.

Sullivan hung up the telephone. He lifted his head and looked at Bradshaw’s impassive, squinting face. “I need to go pick up my father,” he said hoarsely. “Apparently you know where he would be.”

“Turn off your telephone,” whined Bradshaw aggressively. “Every psychic from San Fran to San Clam is probably picking all this up.”

Sullivan stood up and pushed the sweaty hair back from his forehead. “True. Hell, it’s probably been breaking in on TV sets and radios,” he said, “like CB transmissions.” He walked stiffly into the dark office and crouched to unplug the transformer from the wall socket. The air in here was sharp with the oily, metallic, but somehow also organic-smelling reek of ozone.

Bradshaw had followed him, and now swung open the outside door. Late-afternoon sunlight and the cold sea breeze swept into the room, and Elizalde and Kootie and Johanna shuffled blinking out of the smoky kitchen onto the office carpet.

Sullivan twisted the cable clamps off the van battery’s terminals, and then began disconnecting the wires that linked the components of their makeshift device. “We’re off the air,” he remarked.

“If I’m supposed to know where he is,” said Bradshaw, “then he must be at his grave in—the Hollywood Cemetery. I’ve been visiting the grave ever since he died—even after I died.”

Nettled, Sullivan just nodded his head. “That’s fine. Hollywood Cemetery, I know where that is, on Santa Monica, right over the fence from Paramount Studios. Straight up the Harbor Freeway to the 101. I should easily be back before dark.” He would even have time to stop at Max Henry’s on Melrose for a shot or two of Wild Turkey and a couple of chilly Coorses, before going on, north a block, to—to the cemetery.

It occurred to Sullivan that he had not been within the walls of that cemetery since the day of his father’s funeral, in 1959. “Uh,” he asked awkwardly, “where’s his…grave marker?”

“North end of the lake—by Jayne Mansfield’s cenotaph—that means empty grave—she’s buried somewhere else.”

“Okay. Now I wonder if I could borrow your—”

“Explain to him,” interrupted Bradshaw, “that I couldn’t come along. Tell him I’m waiting here, and I—(gasp)—I’ve missed him.” He raised his hand as if fending off an argument. “And you can’t drive that van.”

“No, I was just going to ask if—”

“No,” Bradshaw insisted, “the van is out. It’s a…a disgrace. Take my car, it’s a Chevy Nova. Full tank of gas. It drives a little sideways—but that’ll help—keep anyone from being able to see—which way you’re going.”

“Great,” said Sullivan, wishing he had a beer in his hand right now. “That’s a good idea, thanks.” He squinted through the open doorway at Elizalde, who had walked out across the asphalt and was taking deep breaths of the fresh air. “Angelica,” he called “can I have back the…machine in the fanny pack?”

She gave him an opaque look—she probably couldn’t see him in the dim interior—and then she walked back and stepped up inside. “What is Commander Hold-’Em?” she asked quietly.

“My sister’s slang for death, the Grim Reaper. Is it back in the apartment?”

“You’ve named the gun that?”

Psychiatrists! he thought. “No,” he said patiently. “I was talking about the gun, and then you asked a question about my sister’s term for death and I answered you, and then I was talking about the gun again. Which I still am. Could I have it?”

“You showed me how to use it,” she said. Her brown eyes were still unreadable.

“I remember. After you said you didn’t believe in them.” Suddenly he was sure that her patient, Frank, had killed himself with a gun.

“Kootie would be safer here,” she said, “in this masked area, with Bradshaw or Shadroe or whoever your ‘godbrother’ is.”

“I agree,” said Sullivan, who thought he could see where this was going. “And so would the famous Dr. Elizalde, whose face I saw on the network news, night before last.”

“I’m coming with you,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t intrude on you and your father.”

Bradshaw started to speak, but Sullivan cut him off with the chopping gesture. “Why?” Sullivan asked her.

“Because you should have a gun along with you when you go there,” Elizalde told him, “and I won’t let you go by yourself with a gun, because I think you’re still ‘looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye.’” She was staring straight at him, and she raised her eyebrows now. “That is to say, I think you might kill yourself.”

“No,” interjected Bradshaw worriedly, “I won’t take responsibility for the kid. I told you no kids.”

“I won’t be any trouble, mister,” said Kootie, “just—”

“That’s…hysterical,” Sullivan said to Elizalde. “Give me the goddamn gun.”

“No.” Elizalde jumped out into the yard and sprinted across the asphalt; when she was ten yards away, she turned and shaded her face with her hand to look back at him. She lifted the hem of her untucked old sweatshirt, and he saw that she was wearing the fanny pack. “If you try to take it from me, I will shoot you in the leg.”

His face hot, Sullivan stepped down out of the office. “With a .45? You may as well shoot me in the chest, Angelica!”

Her hand was under the flapping hem of her sweatshirt. “All right. At least you won’t die a suicide, and go to Hell.”

He stopped, and grinned tiredly at her. “Whaa? Is this a psychiatric thing or a Catholic thing?”

“It’s me not wanting you dead, asshole! Why won’t you let me come along?”

Sullivan had lost his indignity somehow, and he shrugged. “Come along, then. I hope you don’t mind if I stop for a drink on the way.”

“Your sister drank, I gather?”

His exhausted grin widened. “You want to make something out of it?”

“I’ve got to make something out of something.”

Bradshaw stepped down to the pavement behind Sullivan. “Take the kid!” he wheezed. “With you!” He seemed to be at a loss for words then. “On Long Beach sands,” he said finally. “I can connect nothing with nothing.”

Sullivan turned around. “What’s the matter with you, Nicky? Kootie can stay in our apartment. He won’t be any trouble. He’ll probably just take a nap.”

“Sure, mister,” said Kootie. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night anyway; I could use a nap. I won’t be any trouble, mister.”

Bradshaw just shook his head. After a moment he shook himself and dug into the pocket of his ludicrous old shorts, and then tossed a ring of keys to Sullivan. “Gray Chevy Nova right behind you,” he said. “The blinkers don’t work right—the emergency flashers come on if you try to signal. Use hand signals, okay?”

Sullivan frowned. “Okay. I guess we’ll for sure be back before dark.”

Bradshaw nodded bleakly. “Leave a dollar in the ashtray for gas.”

CHAPTER FORTY

“It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee.

“Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one oj Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.

“Isn’t he a lovely sight?” said Tweedledum.

Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was.

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

THE cemetery in the late afternoon was full of ghosts, and at first Sullivan and Elizalde tried to avoid them.

Even before they parked Bradshaw’s goofy car, while they were still hardly past the office, they saw semitransparent figures clustered around the big white sculpture of a winged man sexually assaulting a woman. The smoky figures might have been attempting to stop the winged man, or help him subdue the woman, or just conceal the atrocity from the street.

Sullivan swore softly and looked for a place to park. The broad lawns he remembered out front along Santa Monica Boulevard were gone, those spaces now stacked full of shops—a Mexican market and a Chinese restaurant shouldering right up to the east side of the ivied stone buildings of the cemetery entrance, muffler and bodywork shops to the west—but there was still a sense of isolation here inside, in this silent, far-stretching landscape of old sycamores and palms and canted gravestones. Looking through Bradshaw’s windshield at the ghosts that could hold their shapes in this still air, Sullivan wished the noise and smoke and spastic motion of the boulevard could intrude their vital agitations here.

Elizalde had Houdini’s plaster right hand in her lap, and Sullivan was gripping the left one between his knees; the dried thumb was in his shirt pocket.

Past the ghosts was a crossroads, and he turned left onto the narrow paved lane and parked. “The lake’s ahead of us,” he said, hefting Houdini’s plaster hand. “Let’s walk up to it—the noise of the engine might spook him—” He winced at the unintended pun. “—and anyway, this car keeps looking like it’s in the process of running off onto the grass.”

Actually, he simply didn’t want to get there. His father’s ghost was to meet him? Would it be a translucent figure like the ones climbing on the statue?

I was only seven years old! he thought, with no conviction. It was thirty-three years ago! How can I—still—be to blame?

Still, he was profoundly sorry that he had let Elizalde talk him out of the preliminary drinks, and remotely glad that she was holding the gun.

“Okay.” Elizalde seemed subdued as she climbed out of the car, and the double slam of the doors rang hollowly in the quiet groves. “Do normal people see that crowd by the entrance?”

“No,” said Sullivan. “They’re just visible to specimens like you and me.”

Looking north, Sullivan could see the distant white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign standing on the dark hills, and the words holy wood flickered through his mind. To the south across the stone-studded hillocky lawn, past the farthest palms, was the back wall of Paramount Studios, with the red Paramount logo visible on the water tower beyond the air-conditioning ducts.

“It’s…somewhere ahead of us,” said Sullivan, starting forward. He glanced to his left, remembering that Carl Switzer was buried right there by the road somewhere. Switzer had been “Alfalfa” in the old Our Gang comedies, and had been shot to death in January of ‘59. Alfalfa’s grave had been only five months old when Arthur Patrick Sullivan was buried, and the twins, big fans of the Our Gang shows, had found the still-bright marker while silently wandering around the grounds before their father’s graveside service. Neither of them had said anything as they had stared down at Switzer’s glassy-smooth stone marker. It had been obvious that anybody at all could die, at any time.

“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde, scuffing along next to him and holding Houdini’s plaster right hand like a flashlight.

“It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”

“It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”

“I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”

She swung Houdini’s plaster hand and hit Sullivan hard in the shoulder. One of the fingers flew off and bounced in the coarse green grass.

Sullivan had let out a sharp Hah! at the impact, and he sidestepped onto the grass to keep his balance. “Goddammit,” he whispered, rubbing his shoulder as he stepped back down to the asphalt, keeping away from her, “give me back the fucking .45, will you? If you go trying to make some theatrical gesture with that, you’ll kill someone.” He noticed the gap in the hand, and looked around until he spotted the finger. “Oh, good work,” he said, stepping across and bending to pick it up. “It didn’t half cost my dead sister and I any trouble to get hold of these things, go ahead and bust ’em up, by all means.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can glue it. I’m tired, I didn’t mean it to be more than a tap. But you weren’t saying what you believed, just what you wished you believed—that dead people go away and stay away, canceled. Are these ghosts or not?”

He thought her question was rhetorical until she repeated it in an urgent whisper. Then he stopped fiddling with the plaster finger and looked ahead. “Uh,” he said, “my guess is ghosts.”

Three fat men in tuxedos were walking toward them, a hundred feet ahead, where the road was unpaved; the man in the middle had his arms around his companions’ shoulders, and they were all walking in step, but no dust at all was being kicked up, and their steps made no sounds in the still air. Their mouths gaped in wide, silent smiles.

“Let’s slant south, toward Paramount,” said Sullivan.

He and Elizalde set off diagonally across the grass to their right with a purposeful air.

The sun was low over the mausoleum along the distant Gower Street border of the cemetery—the shadows of the palm trees stretched for dozens of yards across the gold-glowing grass.

Griffith’s magic hour, Sullivan thought with a shiver.

Flat markers stippled the low luminous hills in meandering ranks, like stepping-stones, and some graves were bordered with ankle-high sections of scalloped pink concrete, and the interior space of these was consistently filled with broken white stones; a few, the graves of little children, had plastic dinosaurs and toy cars and miniature soldiers set up on the stones to make pitiful dioramas.

Mausoleums like ornate WPA powerhouse relay stations stood along the dirt road ahead of them, and the brassy sunlight shone on the wingless eagle atop the Harrison Gray Otis monument; Sullivan was sure that the eagle had had wings in 1959. The cypresses around them rustled in the gentle breeze and threw down dry leaves.

Sullivan and Elizalde had by now wandered into a marshy area, back by the corrugated-aluminum walls and broken windows of the Paramount buildings, that seemed to be all babies’ graves, the markers sunken and blurred with silt.

Houdini’s maimed hand was shaking in Elizalde’s fists. “We’ve passed those ghosts,” she whispered. “Let’s get to the lake.”

At that moment a wailing laugh erupted from somewhere far off among the trees and gravestones behind them. Elizalde’s free hand was cold and tight in Sullivan’s.

They hurried back to the dirt road, and over it, onto a descending slope of shadowed grass. Ahead of them was a long lake, with stone stairs at the north end and, at the south end, tall white pillars and a marble pedestal rising out of the dark water. A white sarcophagus lay on the pedestal.

“Douglas Fairbanks, Senior,” panted Sullivan as he and Elizalde hurried along the marge of the narrow lake.

Human shapes made out of dried leaves were dancing silently in the shadows of the stairs, and curled sections of dry palm fronds swam and bobbed their fibrous necks out on the dark face of the water.

“Just up the hill and across the next road,” Sullivan said, “is the other lake, the one my father—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence, and just pulled her along.

NICHOLAS BRADSHAW had been standing for several minutes, watching Kootie breathe in his sleep as he lay curled on the wooden floor, before he crouched and shook the boy’s shoulder.

The boy’s eyes opened, but Bradshaw was sure that the alert, cautious intelligence in the gaze was Thomas Edison’s.

“A car went by twice,” said Bradshaw, “slow. I don’t think it was bad guys—but it did make me think you’d be—safer back in the office.”

Kootie got lithely to his feet and glanced at the blinds, which glowed orange around the slats. “They’re not back yet.”

“No,” said Bradshaw. The empty living room echoed hollowly, and he didn’t like to talk in here.

“The boy’s asleep,” said Kootie. “I suppose I can be out in the air for a few minutes—your place does seem to be a deceptive one for trackers to focus on.”

“I’ve tried to make it so,” said Bradshaw, opening the door. “And it helps that I’m a dead man.”

“I reckon,” said Kootie, following him outside.

Parrots fluttered past overhead, shouting raucously, and the mockingbirds on the telephone lines had learned the two-note chirrup that car alarms emitted when they were activated by the key-ring remotes, and which always sounded to Bradshaw like the first two notes of the “Colonel Bogie March.”

Bradshaw was remembering the early days of working on “Ghost of a Chance,” in ‘55 and ‘56. CBS had filmed the show’s episodes on a couple of boxy sets on a soundstage at General Service Studios, and in spite of the depth-and-texture look that Ozzie Nelson had pioneered for “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” the director at General Service had held to the old flat look of early television—bright lighting with minimal shadow and background.

During the show’s tightly scheduled first two years, Nicky Bradshaw had seemed to spend most of his waking hours on those sets, and it had been a deepening and expanding of his whole world when CBS had given the job of filming the show to Stage 5 Productions in 1957. The Stage 5 director had used a series of sets that had been built for Hitchcock’s “The Trouble with Harry”, and often filmed scenes at local parks, and occasionally at the beach.

His world had gone flat again when the show was finally canceled in 1960, a year after his godfather’s death. (He hurried Kootie toward the office—he must do this thing before his godfather’s ghost arrived.) And then it had flattened to the equivalent of sketchy animation in a flip-book after his own death in 1975.

Most of all—more than sex, more than food—he missed dreams. He had not allowed himself to sleep at all in the last seventeen years, for if he were to have a frightening dream while he wasn’t consciously monitoring the workings of his dead body, he wouldn’t be able to wake himself up—and the inescapable trauma would surely be strong enough to cause him to throw ghost-shells in his fright…and, since he had continued occupying his body past the end of his lifeline, the ghosts would have no charged line to arc back to.

They would collide, collapse into jarring interference, implode in fearful spiraling feedback.

He knew of several cases in which a person had suffered a profound trauma only a few moments after unacknowledged death, and had burst into flames. Bradshaw had accumulated seventeen years.

But he could still remember laying his weary body down and closing his eyes and letting sleep take him, remember awakening in darkness and seeing by a luminous clock face that there were hours yet to sleep, remember drifting to wakefulness on sunny mornings with the images of dreams still dissolving before his eyes as he stretched and threw back the covers.

After seventeen years, he wasn’t sure he remembered what dreams were, any more than he really remembered what the sensations of taste had been like. Dreams had been…visions, it seemed to him now, like vivid daydreams over which one had little or no control; scary sometimes, it was true—but also, as he recalled, sometimes achingly erotic, sometimes luminous with a wrenching beauty that seemed to hint of some actual heaven somewhere. And in dreams he had been able to talk and laugh again with people he’d loved who had died.

His hand was on Kootie’s bony shoulder, propelling the boy toward the main building.

When they had both stepped up into the dark office, Bradshaw ducked into the kitchen to fetch Elizalde’s pint bottle of tequila, which was still more than half full.

“You’re how old?” he asked gruffly.

“Eighty-four,” said Kootie.

“Old enough to have a drink.” Bradshaw actually took an involuntary breath, “if you’d like one.”

“A shot won’t hurt the boy,” assented Kootie. “It seems I’ve acquired a taste for the stuff, since my expiration.”

You ghosts always do, thought Bradshaw as he poured a liberal slosh of the yellow liquor into a Flintstones glass.

“You’re not going to have any?” asked Kootie alertly.

“Oh,” said Bradshaw, “sure. I’ve just got to find a cup for myself.” On a bookshelf he found one of the coffee cups from which he’d been drinking his Eat-’Em-&Weep Balls tea, and he poured an ounce of tequila in on top of the red stickiness.

Kootie raised his glass, but waited until Bradshaw had tipped up his coffee cup and taken a mouthful of the tequila.

What do I do now, thought Bradshaw—swallow it?

He glanced up at Kootie, who hadn’t even taken a sip yet. Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.

That will do, he thought. I suppose that stuff will just sit in my stomach until it…evaporates? Soaks into my dead tissues like a marinade? For the next day or two, he thought seriously, I’ll have to be careful about burping around any open flame.

Flame, he thought, and he remembered those cases of “spontaneous combustion” that had occurred when a newly dead person experienced an emotional trauma. In a number of the cases, the person had been drinking alcohol.

He put down the cup. “I’m too old for tequila,” he said. He inhaled, feeling again the chill of the fast-evaporating alcohol in his mouth. “I’ll be regretting even just that one sip.”

Edison took another swallow from his glass. “Well, I’m eighty-four years old, but I’m working with an eleven-year-old stomach. The boy will probably sleep through until morning, so another drink or two will do no harm. I’ve got something to celebrate anyway.”

Too weary to speak, Bradshaw raised his eyebrows.

“I received a Bachelor of Science degree on Sunday.”

Bradshaw couldn’t imagine what Edison was talking about, but he nodded ponderously as he reached for the bottle to refill Kootie’s glass. “That’s good.” He sucked air into his lungs. “A college degree can make all the difference in the world.”

THERE WAS a broader lake in a shallow green meadow on the north side of the cemetery lane, and its water was still enough that Sullivan could clearly see the vertical reflections of the tall palms on the far shore. There were two more palm trees reflected in the water than there were standing on the shore.

Marble benches stood here and there on the grass slope, and there seemed to be figures sitting on every one. Some stared at Sullivan and Elizalde, while others silently went through the motions of talking or laughing, and a couple were bent over notebooks, perhaps writing poetry. Sullivan supposed that one or two of them might be living people who saw this place as solitary.

Past the urns and markers and statues he hurried, holding Elizalde’s free hand as they made their way down the slope. Around the north curve of the shore, only a few hundred feet ahead, he could see another rectangle of broken white stones, and he was sure that his father’s grave was very near there.

He and Elizalde were striding along the shoreline now to stay away from the ghosts on the slope, though the animate palm fronds swam in closer to them, creaking woodenly in eerily good imitation of the grumble of ducks. Rope-wide grooves were curled and looped across the muddy bottom of the shallow lake, as if big worms had been foraging earlier in the day.

Sullivan blinked around at the marble-studded slopes, and he sniffed the chilly jasmined air—then realized that it was a sound that he had become aware of, a low vibration as if a lot of people hiding behind the nearer stones and trees were humming the same bass note.

Clustered red water lilies hid the lake floor at this north end of the lake, and his father’s grave was just on the far side of a bushy gray-green juniper that overhung the water.

“Got to go back up the slope for just a few steps,” he said tightly, “to get around this shrubbery.”

“I’d rather wade across,” whispered Elizalde.

He thought about the worm tracks, and for a moment he wondered if there even was a bottom right here, under the blanket of water lilies. “It’s just a few steps,” he said, tugging her uphill around the juniper. Two ghosts were pirouetting on the Cecil B. DeMille crypts, but no one was paying any evident attention to Sullivan and Elizalde.

Back down beside the water on the far side, he saw that a knee-high white statue of the Virgin Mary had been propped up on the rectangle of white stones, with red flowers in the little stone hands and a black cloth hood tied around the head.

Jayne Mansfield’s etched pink cenotaph lay at the feet of the stone Virgin; the surface of the marker had apparently once had a reproduction of Mansfield’s face bonded to it, but the image had been crudely chipped off. In the shadows under the juniper Sullivan could see a couple of empty cans of King Cobra malt liquor and a dozen white candles in a clear plastic bag.

Off a few steps to the east of Mansfield’s marker lay a low black-marble square that, from the way its placement jibed with his thirty-three-year-old memories, must be the one that would have his father’s name on it.

KOOTIE’S HEAD seemed to be bobbing in time to a slow pulse, and Bradshaw stood up and fetched a jar from the kitchen. It was a Smucker’s orange-marmalade jar, scraped nearly empty.

“How’re you doing,” he said as he plodded back into the office with it. “Mr. Edison.” Kootie was frowning intently, and the expression made him even look like an old man, in the dim sunlight that filtered in through the lantana branches clustered outside the windows. “I’m afraid,” he said with evident care, “that I’ve stuck poor Kootie with…what I trust will be…the first hangover of his life.”

Bradshaw knew that if his flesh had still been alive, his hand would have trembled as he held out the marmalade jar. “Best thing for the boy would be,” he said. There was no heartbeat in his chest, but it should have been knocking. “For you to get sick now, while the booze is still. Undigested. Cough yourself out into this jar. The boy will feel better for it.”

“There never has been a vacuum produced in this country that approached anywhere near the vacuum which is necessary for me,” said Edison, articulating each syllable meticulously with Kootie’s mouth. “A hundred-thousandth of an atmosphere was enough to let the filament burn. I need to find my vacuum.”

“This jar is evacuated,” said Bradshaw. “Hop in. You’ve had too much to drink. Carry the hangover into the jar. To free the boy.”

“Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists. Nothing wrong with my…sibilant syllables.” Kootie’s eyes were half closed.

“Dammit,” said Bradshaw. “Mr. Edison. Exhale yourself. Get in the jar.”

But Kootie’s chin wobbled downward, lifted once with a questioning whine, then dropped to his chest. A hoarse snore blew out through the boy’s lips, but Bradshaw knew it was just breath, not Edison’s ghost.

“Mr. Edison,” said Bradshaw, his voice droning flatly as he tried to speak louder. “Wake up. It’s just a hop, skip, and a sigh. To bed.”

Kootie was unconscious, though, and didn’t stir even when Bradshaw reached out to nudge his head with the empty jar.

Bradshaw’s face was immobile, but a red tear ran down his gray cheek as he set the jar carefully on the cleared-off desk.

Horribly, there still was something he could do.

ARTHUR PATRICK SULLIVAN

“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”

1898-1959

Sullivan waved a circling gnat away from his face and stared down at his father’s gravestone. He was tightly holding Elizalde’s hand.

His father’s stone had a picture attached, too; a playing-card-sized greened-brass plaque with an engraving of the old man’s face etched on it. Sullivan recognized the smiling likeness; it was from a Fox Studios publicity still taken in the forties.

The breeze paused, and when it came back it was chillier. The palm-frond swans scudded away toward the ring of fountain jets that stuck up above the surface of the water; Sullivan had at first glance thought the nozzles were a cluster of baby ducklings, and perhaps they still appeared so to the creaking frond-birds.

Sullivan released Elizalde’s hand, crouched, and touched the inset plaque—and it was loose, simply resting in the shallow rectangular recess in the stone. He pried it out with a fingernail and stood up again, tucking it into his shirt pocket and retaking hold of Elizalde’s hand.

Sullivan’s mouth was dry and tasted of pennies. When he began to speak, he found that his voice had a rusty flippancy: “So where are you, Dad?” he asked, aware that Elizalde was listening. “We want to be on the road before the evening traffic gets heavy.”

The breeze twitched at his hair, and then a small voice in his ear said. “Call me Fishmeal.”

Sullivan didn’t move. The voice might be that of any random ghost. He seemed to remember that the line was from the beginning of Moby Dick.

“On the freeways,” the voice went on, “there you feel free.”

Sullivan’s heart was suddenly beating hard enough to shake his shoulders. That phrase was familiar—it was something his father had always said to the twins, though the old man had only lived to see the earliest of the Southern California superhighways—the 110 to South Pasadena, and the one that he had always stubbornly gone on calling the Ramona Freeway, though it had been renamed the San Bernardino Freeway four years before he died.

Sullivan’s mouth opened, but all the things there were to say overwhelmed him, and he just exhaled a descending “Ssshhhhh.”

“You’re a good boy” said the tiny buzzing voice, “and I know you wont slap me, even though I am an insect.”

Sullivan’s hand was cold and shaking in Elizalde’s, and he guessed that she was looking at him in concern, but he held his head still.

“What kind of insect?” he whispered.

“Good, then you don’t—” began the voice—

But it was interrupted by the wailing hyena laughter from the shadowy trees.

Elizalde’s free hand gripped his, hard. “It’s that laughing bag,” she whimpered. “The thing Kootie and I saw today—the thing that spoke on the phone.”

“Swing south,” buzzed the voice, “past Fairbanks to the Paramount wall, there’s a tunneling effect there, the field of the movies overlaps a bit and blurs things; then just cut north to the entrance.”

“Back the way we came;’ said Sullivan, pulling Elizalde away from the juniper bush and the stone Virgin. “But we can go around this other side of the lake.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s in my ear,” Sullivan told her. And he remembered the scene in the railway carriage in Through the Looking-Glass, and he added with weary certainty, “He’s a gnat.”

Elizalde obviously hadn’t understood what he had said, but let herself be hurried along up the east shore of the lake.

Trying to run smoothly so as not to jar his head and possibly dislodge his father, Sullivan nevertheless kept glancing across the lake, toward the setting sun. The figures on the far-side slope were beginning to fragment; an old woman would take a tottering step and then abruptly be a child running, and a figure on a bench would close a book and stand up and suddenly be two figures. One pedestrian became a motorcycle and rider, and silently sped away over the grass, bounding over gravestones as if they were hurdles.

Up by the Cathedral Mausoleum, Sullivan and Elizalde crossed the grass through a cluster of stones with Armenian names, each of which had an unlit candle in front of it and a dish for burning incense, and then they had sprinted across the road and were hurrying past the west side of the mausoleum, toward the stairs above the lake grave of Douglas Fairbanks.

“Scuttle fast and low through the little valley past these stairs,” Sullivan whispered, “and then when we’re among the trees—”

A sudden, shocking racket from the west slope of the Douglas Fairbanks lake made them both instantly crouch and bare their teeth—it was a loud metallic squealing drowned out by idiot laughter.

A thing was flapping toward them from the trees beyond the road to the west, about ten feet above the grass and muscling its way rapidly through the twilight air; it flexed through a slanting beam of golden sunlight, and Sullivan saw that it had long metal wings but its body was a swinging burlap bag with a baseball cap bobbing on top.

Elizalde’s razory scream seemed to shake leaves out of the overhanging willow branches, and she let go of Houdini’s plaster right hand—and it disappeared.

Sullivan’s hand was abruptly empty too; but when he glanced down he saw that he was wearing a black formal jacket with white shirt cuffs just visible at his wrists.

And then he felt the sleeves of the jacket snap loose above the elbows when the jacket and pants twisted him to his left, toward the stone stairs that led down to the lake.

“Whoa, Nellie!” buzzed Sullivan’s father in his ear.

Elizalde too had turned toward the stairs. She was shorter suddenly, and plump, and her hair was up in a wide bun above the high collar of her lacy white blouse; but the eyes in the unfamiliar round face were Elizalde’s brown eyes, and white showed all the way around the irises.

“It’s the mask,” said Sullivan jerkily as he found himself scuffing down the stone steps toward the water. “Relax and go with it—I think we’re about to start wading.”

His unfamiliar shoes stepped right off the bottom step into the warm water, and sank to the ankles in silt; then his long shirtsleeves pulled his arms forward and he was diving.

He braced himself to land flat and not strike his knees or elbows on the bottom—but there was no bottom, and he was swimming breathlessly in choppy cold water. Cold salt water.

He gasped in sudden shock, stiff with vertigo even though he was supported by the water. He didn’t know where he was, or even if he was still conscious and not hallucinating.

The splashing of his clumsy strokes was echoed back to him by a close wall which was not the wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum but, only yards away, the vertical black steel hull of a ship too vast to be comprehended from way down here.

Someone on a deck far above cried, “Get out of town tonight!”

Sullivan could hear Elizalde splashing along next to him, but in the quickly lowering darkness he couldn’t see her. Some current kept bumping him against the steel hull of the ship and bumping Elizalde against him, even when they both swam sharply out away from it—and then he heard a metallic boom as Elizalde collided with a wall on her side; apparently the two of them were now swimming through some narrow channel.

And the walls were sharply concave now, curling up around him. The light was gone, and Sullivan’s knees had somehow got jammed up under his chin by the rounded metal that was now underneath him too.

He was shivering violently at the speed and force of whatever was happening—but then it stopped, and he was encapsulated underwater, in darkness.

He could feel the struggling bony pressure of Elizalde crowding hard at his back, and he knew that she was being tightly constricted by the wall on her side. They were completely submerged in solid water now, with no smallest pocket of air.

A metal floor was shoved up against Sullivan’s shoes, and the echoes of his scraping soles told him that there was a lid very close over his head. He and Eiizalde had got trapped inside some kind of closed cylinder full of water. Sullivan’s ear canals chugged and bubbled as they were icily filled, and his heart hammered at the mental image of his father lost again under seawater.

Sullivan reached out to push against the wall in front of his face, and he felt tightly ratcheted handcuffs cut into the skin of his wrists. Elizalde was thrashing furiously against his back.

With her shaking him, he couldn’t even get his legs under himself to batter his head against the lid, and he was about to lose the breath that was clenched inside his lungs by blowing it all out in a helpless scream—when he became aware that his hands were busy.

His right hand had dug in the kinky hair over his ear and pulled free something that felt like a hairpin; and his fingers now worked carefully as they straightened the bit of wire. He knew that they were working more slowly and carefully because one finger was now missing.

He managed to nudge Elizalde in the back of her ribs with his left elbow, hoping the gesture conveyed, Hold still!

Then the fingers had deftly poked the wire into the receiver slot of the left cuff, between the close cowl and the knurled outer side of the swing arm, and, without letting go of the wire, his fingers had gripped the sides of the cuff and compressed it painfully tighter—and a moment later the swing arm had sprung back out, and his left wrist was freed. His left hand took the wire then, and, with all of its fingers to work with, freed his right wrist even more quickly.

He pushed Elizalde back and braced his feet. Now his hands thrust up past his head, scraping his elbows against the claustrophobically close metal walls, and pressed strongly upward against the metal lid—and twisted. The forceful torque released a catch, and then he was turning the whole lid and the upper edge of the cylinder, bracing his feet against the floor. He straightened his legs, and he was lifting the lid off of them, pushing it up with his hands, which were out in rushing cold air to the wrists—and only then did Sullivan realize that he and Elizalde had been upright rather than lying horizontally.

And then up abruptly became down, and both of them were falling headfirst out of the narrow can while air bubbles clunked and rattled past them; Sullivan’s shoulders jammed in the narrower neck for a moment, but the water and a lot of loose metal disks coursing past him pushed him free—

And he fell through sunlit air and splashed heavily into shallow water, twisting his neck and shoulder against a muddy bottom and catching Elizalde’s knee hard in the small of his back.

When he struggled up to a sitting position the water was rocking around his chest and his eyes were blinking in the golden light of late afternoon. He was leaning back against vertical stone, wheezing and panting, and through the sopping tangles of his hair he could see two branching tree trunks standing up from the shadowed brown water a couple of yards away from where he sat, and, a couple of yards beyond them, a low cement coping and a hedge; a few of the top leaves shone golden green in the last rays of sunlight.

His hands were spasmodically clawing in the silty mud under him, trying to find a tree root to grip in case the world was going to turn upside down again.

Elizalde sat up in the water beside him and held on to his shoulder while she coughed out muddy water and whoopingly sucked air into her lungs. Her mud-matted hair was long again, and the lean, tired face was her own. When he could see that she would be able to breathe, Sullivan cautiously leaned his head back and looked up. He was sitting against a square marble pillar that supported a marble crosspiece far overhead. He and Elizalde were apparently in the south corner of the lake, in the tail-end lagoon behind the marble walls of the Douglas Fairbanks monument. The world was holding still, and he began to relax, muscle by muscle. There was a twisting itch in his ear then, and he nearly thrust his finger into it; but the buzzing voice said, “You’ve got to get to the Paramount wall—but first grope around in the water and get Houdini's hands”

“Okay, Dad.”

Sullivan pushed away from the pillar and slowly waded on his knees out across the pool, his face bent so closely over the water that his harsh breaths blew rings onto the surface, and he swept his hands through the velvety silt. Elizalde was just breathing hoarsely and watching him.

Faintly he could hear a rapid creak of metal and quacking laughter, but the sounds were distant and not drawing closer.

The silt was thick with pennies and nickels and dimes, but he tossed them aside—Elizalde inhaled sharply when she saw the first handful of them—and at last he found the plaster hand with the missing finger and silently handed it to her, and then a few moments later he found the other.

“Up this far slope to the service road,” he whispered to Elizalde, “and then turn right and hug the wall all the way back west. The car is—”

“You were in there, with me,” interrupted Elizalde tensely, “right? The can was full of salt water this time, wasn’t it?”

Sullivan sucked the elastic cuff of his leather jacket; and he thought that it still tasted of salt. “I don’t know if it really happened or not,” he said, “but I was in there with you.’

In Sullivan’s ear the voice resonated again: “At the end there, that was Houdini's famous escape from the padlocked milk can. Big news in the teens and twenties.”

Sullivan helped Elizalde stand up in the yielding mud, and then he waded to the coping, stepped up onto it, and threw one leg over the hedge. “My dad says that was Houdini’s famous escape from the milk can,” he said, quietly.

“This time it was ours,” Elizalde said, reaching up from the water for Sullivan to give her a boost. “Happy birthday.”

NICHOLAS BRADSHAW had shambled slowly out across the shadow-streaked parking lot to Pete Sullivan’s shrouded van, and by the back bumper he crouched to pick up the little magnet they’d taken out of the telephone. Before turning his steps toward one of the garages, he put the magnet in his mouth.

I wonder, he thought stolidly, if you’re held entirely accountable for sins you commit after you’re dead. Kids before the age of reason aren’t considered capable of knowing right from wrong, so if a five-year-old kills a playmate, he’s not blamed. Or not much. He’s just a little kid, after all. So what about adults past the age of… expiration? We’re just dead guys, after all.

He thought of the “beasties,” the solid ghosts who wandered up from the beach in the evenings and hung around outside his office door, waiting for Bradshaw to set out paper plates with smooth pebbles on them. The poor old creatures could be vindictive—they sometimes pulled license plates off parked cars, and once or twice had got into incomprehensible squabbles among themselves and left broken-off fingers and noses to be swept up in the morning along with the usual litter of rocks and beer cans—but it would be folly to assign blame to them. “Wicked” was too concrete an adjective to be supported by the frail nouns that they were.

He tugged open the creaking garage door, and dug out a folded tarpaulin and a big paint tray from behind the dusty frame of a ‘55 Chevy. He carried them outside and pulled the door back down.

When he had lugged everything across the lot and up into the office, Kootie was still snoring heavily in the Naugahyde chair by the desk.

Bradshaw dropped his burdens and stumped into the kitchen and shook a steak knife free of the litter in one of the cabinet drawers.

He would work without thinking—he would spread the tarpaulin out across the rug and lay the paint tray in the middle of it; then he would lift Kootie out of the chair…

But he himself was not one of those mindless solid ghosts. He couldn’t honestly take refuge in that shabby category. He was dead (through no fault of his own), but his soul had not ever vacated his body.

His face was cool, and when he brushed his hand across his forever-unstubbled jowls, it came away wet. Tears or sweat, it was Eat-’Em-&-Weep juice either way.

Bradshaw would, he was determined that he would, simply lean over the boy’s face and, with the telephone magnet between his teeth, inhale the boy’s dying breath.

Bradshaw would thus get Edison. And Edison could monitor Bradshaw’s body during the long nights aboard the boat, so that Bradshaw himself could sleep, and dream—just as Kootie had been able to sleep while the old ghost walked and spoke and looked out for him.

I’ve never eaten a ghost, Bradshaw thought; well, why would I, none of the average run of ghosts could responsibly watch the store while I slept. But Thomas Edison could.

Thomas Edison is probably the only ghost that I’d do this to get, he thought, and certainly the only very powerful one I’ll ever get a shot at; the only one that could let me safely dream. I wouldn’t…sell my soul, ever, except for this. It’s God’s fault, really, for putting this within my reach.

He remembered the boy saying, I wont be any trouble, mister.

Bradshaw stood over the snoring boy, staring at the pulse under his ear; and then he looked down at his right hand, which was gripping the steak knife.

For the first time since his death in 1975, his hand was trembling.

HUNCHING ALONG through the shadows under Paramount Studios’ corrugated aluminum back wall that was streaked with rust stains and gap-toothed with broken windows, Sullivan thought of the broad sunny lanes and parking lots and white monolithic soundstages on the other side. When he had last been on the Paramount lot, in about 1980, there had even been a dirt-paved street of Old West buildings under a vast open-air mural of a blue sky.

“We made a hundred and four pictures there in 1915,” said his father’s tiny voice in his ear, “back when it was Lasky, DeMille, and Goldfish in charge, and we’d moved everything here from the barn at Vine and Selma. Sixteen frames a second, the old Lumiere standard. Now because of sound reproduction it’s twenty-four frames a second, ninety feet a minute, and nobody needs to know how to read in order to see a movie, and the purity of the silent silver faces is gone. For us, the graveyard extends all the way south to Melrose.”

Sullivan glanced back through the trees toward the Douglas Fairbanks lake. “Keep your voice down, Dad.”

“Keep your voice down,” whispered Elizalde, who of course couldn’t hear what his father was saying.

Gravestones stood in thickly clustered ranks outside the Beth Olam Mausoleum, and Sullivan felt as though he and Elizalde and his father were hiding behind a crowd. The shadowy human-shaped figures that stood among the stones seemed to be facing away almost vigilantly, as though guarding Arthur Patrick Sullivan’s retreat, and the multitudinous bass humming was louder.

“You got a lot of friends here, Dad?” Pete Sullivan whispered.

“Oh, sure,” said the voice in his ear. “Go up to the doors there, and rap shave-and-a-haircut.”

“Just a sec,” Sullivan told Elizalde, and then he sprinted up the steps to the locked door of the mausoleum and rapped on the glass: knock, knock, knock-knock, knock

From inside came the answering knock, knock.

Elizalde was smiling and shaking her head as he rejoined her and they began walking north along the broad straight lane; receding perspective made the curbs seem to converge in the distance, and on the blue hills above the implicit intersection point stood once again the familiar white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Why, Sullivan thought, can’t I get away from it?

“It’s a gravestone, too,” said Sullivan’s father.

For a minute they trudged along in silence through the gathering twilight. A couple of cars were parked ahead, and real people were opening the doors and climbing in; Sullivan no longer felt that he and Elizalde were conspicuous intruders.

As they walked up to Bradshaw’s car Sullivan thought he heard laughter in the remote distance, but there was no triumph anymore in the cawing; and, from some radio or tape player a bit closer, he heard the opening notes of Al Jolson’s “California Here I Come.”

I been away from you a long time…Sullivan thought.

They climbed in and closed the doors gently. Sullivan started the engine, and as they drove out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and turned right, making oncoming cars swerve because of the way the Nova’s skewed front end seemed to be about to cross the divider line, Sullivan said, impulsively, “Dad, I don’t know if you knew it or not, but I didn’t swim out, to help you.”

Elizalde was looking out the window at the Chinese restaurant they were passing.

“I knew it,” buzzed the gnat in his ear. “And we both know it wouldn’t have done any good if you had swum out, and we both know that isn’t an excuse you’ll look at.”

Sullivan hiked up a pack of Marlboros from the side pocket of his jacket and bit one cigarette out of it. “Did Sukie—Elizabeth—tell you that Kelley Keith is gunning for you?”

“I knew she’d be waiting for me. So I came ashore hidden inside a sea monster. Grounded and damped to a flat magnetic line.”

Sullivan pushed in the cigarette-lighter knob. “What…brings you to town?” he asked, unable to keep the defensive flippancy out of his tone. He didn’t look at Elizalde.

“Why, I got a free ticket to the coast,” droned the gnat’s voice, possibly trying to imitate Sullivan’s tone, “and I thought I’d look you kids up.” The voice was silent, then said, “A big one was switched on here, and all of us were sympathetically excited by it. I came out of the ocean, after God knows how long; to find that the broken stragglers of Elizabeth had joined me, and that you had never—” The voice lapsed again.

“Had never what, Dad?” Sullivan asked softly, looking almost across Elizalde to see where he was going through the windshield. “Stopped running? Away from the surf, that would be, Angelica.” His smile was stiff. “I didn’t want to look back, that’s for sure. ‘I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Dusk: Be soon,’ remember that, Dad? Francis Thompson poem. I’ve always tried to…what, to have nothing permanent, leave nothing behind that would, like, hang around. I always hated things to be…etched in stone.”

“Uh,” said Elizalde hesitantly, “I think the car’s on fire.”

Smoke was trickling, then billowing, from the slots on the top of the dashboard. “Shit,” said Sullivan—he snatched the cigarette lighter out of its slot, and blinked for a moment at the flaming, gummy wad on the end of it; then he gripped the wheel with his free fingers while he cranked down the driver’s-side window with his left hand, and he pitched the burning thing out onto the street: “That was the cigarette lighter, wasn’t it?” he asked angrily.

Elizalde bent over to look at the still-smoking ring in the dashboard. “Yes,” she said. “No—it’s a cigar lighter. Wait a minute—altogether it says, L.A.CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL. What the hell does that mean?”

Sullivan waved caramel-reeking smoke away from his face, and he was remembering the tin ashtray that had briefly burst into flame at Los Tres Jesuses on Wednesday morning. “Let’s remember to ask Nicky.”

“Freeway coming up,” said Elizalde.

AND SO, thought Nicholas Bradshaw as he tucked the still-clean knife back in the kitchen drawer, I don’t get the renewal, I don’t get a rebirth. I have heard the candy-colored clowns they call the sandmen singing each to each—I do not think that they will sing to me.

Cinnamon tears were still running down his slack cheeks, and his hands were still trembling, but, when he had plodded back into the office, he crouched and picked up Kootie’s limp, breathing body and straightened up again with no sense of effort. He even stood on his bad right ankle long enough to hook the outside door open with the left, and felt no twinge of pain.

Shutting down, he thought.

The boy whined in his sleep as the chilly evening air ruffled his sweat-damp hair. Every step Bradshaw took across the shadowed asphalt seemed to be the snap of a television being turned off, the slam of a door in an emptied building, the thump of a yellowed copy of Spooked being tossed out of a vacated apartment onto a ruptured vinyl beanbag chair in an alley. I am unmaking myself, he thought. I am looking at a menu and pointing past the flowing script on the vellum page, past the margin and the deckle edge, right off the cover of the menu, at, finally, the crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray.

“I believe I feel like Death Warmed Over this evening,” he said out loud.

Aside from a remote sadness that was almost nostalgia, he had no feelings about his decision not to kill Kootie and inhale the Edison ghost: not guilt at having considered doing it, nor satisfaction at having decided not to. He had held the knife beside the boy’s ear for several minutes, knowing that he could hide the body in one of the several freezers in the garages, and that Pete Sullivah and the Angelica woman would believe him when he told them that the boy must have run away; knowing too that he would be able thereafter to sleep again, and dream.

Had it been the thought of the sort of dreams he might have had, that had made him finally pull back the knife? He didn’t think so. Even if the dreams had proved to be uniformly horrible—of the day he learned of his stepfather’s death, for example, or the summer-of-’75 week he had spent drunk and freshly dead inside the refrigerator on the Alaskan trawler in the Downtown Long Beach Marina, or whatever detail-memories the murdering of Kootie would have given him—he still thought he could have lived with them.

In the end he just hadn’t been able to justify extending the mile-markers of his personal highway by reducing this living boy to one of them.

At the apartment door now, he set the boy upright against the wall, and held him in place with one hand while he opened the door with the other. Then he got his arms under the boy’s arms and knees again and carried him inside.

Bradshaw knelt to lay Kootie on the floor where he had been napping earlier. The boy began snoring, and Bradshaw got to his feet and left the apartment, being sure that the door was locked behind him.

Back in his office he sat down on the couch without bothering to turn on any lights. The desk was bare—the components of the telephone had been disassembled and laid in a cardboard box, and Bradshaw had not brought the television set back in. His charred pigs, relieved of their malignant batteries, lay in a heap in the corner. Distantly he wondered if he would ever again marshal his warning systems.

He reached around behind the arm of the couch and pulled free the broom, then clutched the straw end and boomed the top of the stick twice against the ceiling.

Tomorrow, he thought, I’d like to drive to the Hollywood Cemetery myself, and lie down on one of those green slopes and just sleep. But I’ve been dead for seventeen years—God knows how bad it might be. The explosion might knock half the mausoleums off their foundations.

He heard Johanna’s door slam upstairs, and then in the quiet night he could hear the faint ringing of the metal stairs. There was silence when she had got down to the asphalt, and then came a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said. “It’s not locked.”

Johanna pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Not by accident?” she said in a concerned voice. “Always you lock it. And won’t you get your pigs and TV back up?”

“I don’t think, so,” he said. Sweetie-pie.” He inhaled, and then made words of the sigh: “Bring me a can of snuff, would you please? (Gasp) And then sit here by me.”

The couch shifted when she sat down. “And no lights,” she said.

“No.” He took the snuff can from her extended hand and twisted the lid. “Tomorrow is Halloween,” he said. “All these things we’ve had up through this night—will be broken up and lost. Like a rung bell finally stopping ringing—but. When dawn comes. Find it a sweet day, Johanna. Find it a blessed day. Live in the living world. While it lasts for you. I hope it may see you happy, and not hungry. Not hurt, not crying. Every one of me will be watching over you. To help, with all of whatever I’m worth then.”

He tapped a little pile of snuff out onto his knuckle and sniffed it up his nose. Almost he thought he could smell it.

Johanna had tucked her head under his jaw, and her shoulders were shaking. “It’s all right if I cry now,” she whispered.

He tossed the little can out onto the dark rug and draped his arm around her. “For a while,” he said.

After a time he heard the crunch of the Nova’s tires on the broken pavement outside, and he kissed her and stood up. He knew it must have got cold outside by now, and he went to the closet to put on a shirt.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

“—then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened.

“I like them when they can talk” Alice said. “None of them ever talk, where I come from.”

“What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.

“I don’t rejoice in insects at all “ Alice explained, “because I’m rather afraid of them…”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

IN spite of their muddy clothes, Sullivan and Elizalde had stopped to buy a couple of pizzas and a package of paper plates and an armload of Coke and Coors six-packs, and when they had turned on the chandelier light in the apartment living room Sullivan carried the supplies to the open kitchen. He was glad of the heat being on so high in the apartment. “Wake up Kootie,” he called, “he’ll want some of this.”

Elizalde crouched over the boy and shook him, then looked up blankly. “He’s passed out drunk, Pete. Tequila, by the smell.”

Sullivan had unzipped his sodden leather jacket, and now paused before trying to pull his hands through the clinging sleeves. How did he—? Could he be a drunk already, at his age?”

“I suppose. Did you bring the bottle back here?”

“No, didn’t think of it.” He worked his arms free and tossed the jacket into a corner, where it landed heavily.

They had left the front door open, and now Nicky Bradshaw spoke from the doorstep. “I gave it to him,” he said “He was Edison. We were talking, and he said he could have a couple.”

Elizalde stood up, obviously furious. “That’s…criminal!“ she said. “Edison should have had more sense. He’s in loco parentis here—I wonder if he let his own kids drink hard liquor.” She squinted at Bradshaw. “You should have known better too.”

“I wasn’t watching him pour,” Bradshaw said. “Can I come in?” “Nicky!” buzzed the gnat in Sullivan’s ear, and then it was gone. “Yeah, come in,” Sullivan said. “Where’s Johanna?”

“She’s fixing her makeup.” Bradshaw stepped ponderously in, creaking the floorboards. “Did you find—” His hand jerked up toward his head, then stopped, and suddenly his weathered face tensed and his eyes widened. “Uncle Art!” he said softly.

Sullivan looked down at Elizalde, who was still crouched over Kootie. “My father flew over to him,” he explained. “How is Kootie?”

“I think he’s waking up. You’ve got instant coffee in your van? Could you go get it?

“Sure.” She had carried in Houdini’s hands and laid them by the door, and he hefted one up as he stepped outside, but though the night breeze chilled him in his damp clothes he didn’t feel peril in it, here. He walked shivering across the lot to the van and lifted the parachute to get at the side doors with his key; in the total darkness inside, he groped like a blind man, finding the coffee jar and a spoon and a couple of cups by touch, with Houdini’s hand tucked under his arm.

Before he climbed down out of the van, he stood beside the bed and sniffed the stale air. He could smell cigarette smoke, and the faintly vanilla aroma of pulp paperback books, and the machine-oil smells of the .45 and the electrical equipment he had bought today. It occurred to him that it was unlikely that the van would ever be driven again, and he wondered how long this frail olfactory diary would last. On the way out he carefully pulled the doors closed before lifting the parachute curtain to step away from the van.

Kootie was awake and grumbling when Sullivan got back inside, and Bradshaw was sitting against the wall in the corner, muttering and laughing softly through pink tears. Sullivan pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, but didn’t go over to where Bradshaw and his father were talking, instead striding on to the kitchen. Elizalde stood up from beside Kootie to help Sullivan unpack the supplies.

They took turns washing their hands in the sink, then opened the pizza boxes. “Edison says he doesn’t want any,” Elizalde said as she lifted a hot slice of pepperoni-and-onion pizza onto a paper plate, “but I think he will when he sees it.”

Sullivan had measured a spoonful of powdered coffee into one of the cups, and now he turned to frown at the water he had left running in the sink. “I wonder if this is even connected to a hot pipe,” he said, putting a finger into the cold stream from the tap.

“You could always make it from the back of the toilet,” she said. “That’s plenty hot. And it’s what Edison deserves.”

“Kootie is still in there?” Sullivan asked quietly.

“Yes. It was him that first woke up. Edison’s planning to ‘go into the sea’ tomorrow, and I think it’s doing Kootie good to have him run things in the meantime, so Kootie can get a lot of sleep.”

“You’re the doctor.” The water was still running cold, so Sullivan put down the coffee cup, jacked a Coors out of one of the six-pack cartons, and popped the tab on top. “Do you figure you’ve laid Frank Rocha?” He stepped back before her sudden hot glare. “What I mean is, you know, is the ghost laid. Is he R.I.P. now? Can we just… buy some kind of old car and leave California?”

“You and me and Kootie?”

“Kootie? Is he part of the family?”

“Are we a family?” Her brown eyes were wide and serious.

Sullivan looked away, down at the pizza. He lifted another triangle of it onto a paper plate. “I meant partnership. Is he part of the partnership?”

“Is your father?”

“Jesus, is this what you psychiatrists do? Take the night off, will you?” He looked across the room just as Johanna stepped up to the front door. “Here, Johanna, you want a piece of pizza?”

“And a beer, please,” she said, walking in. Her blue eye shadow looked freshly applied, but her eyes were red, and she was wearing a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe.

Sullivan pushed the paper plate across the counter to her and opened her a beer. He didn’t want to talk to Elizalde; he was uncomfortable to realize that he had meant the double entendre about laying Frank Rocha, though he had acted surprised and innocent when she had glared at him. Was he jealous of her? He knew he was jealous of Bradshaw’s easy conversation over in the corner with his father, though he didn’t want to take Bradshaw’s place.

Then abruptly his ear tickled, and his father’s tiny voice said, “Nicky’s got to go to some other building here. Let’s you and me walk along. Your girl can talk to Nicky’s girl”

My girl, thought Sullivan. “That’s not how it is,” he said. He was sweating in spite of his clinging, wet clothes—for his father would want to talk seriously now—and he picked up the can of Coors.

“Your sister went on to drink a lot, didn’t she?”

Sullivan paused, with the beer halfway to his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

“I could tell. Do you know why I came back, out of the sea? There goes Nicky, follow him.”

Bradshaw was at the open doorway. “Nick,” said Sullivan, putting down the beer and stepping past Elizalde out of the kitchen area. “Wait up, I’ll—we’ll—walk you there. “

“Thank you, Pete,” said Bradshaw. “I’d like that.”

Bradshaw began clumping heavily across the dark lot toward the office, and Sullivan walked alongside, his hands in his pockets. “Nick,” he said. “What does. ‘L.A. cigar—too tragical’ mean?”

“Damn it,” said Bradshaw in his flat voice. “Did you burn up the car?” He stepped up to his office door and pushed it open.

“No, but I threw your cigarette lighter out onto Santa Monica Boulevard.” Sullivan followed him inside to the kitchen, where Bradshaw opened a cupboard to pry a finely painted china plate out of a dusty stack.

“It’s a…mercy thing,” said Bradshaw, not looking at him. “That some people do. It’s a hippodrome, where it reads the same forwards as backwards. I don’t know who started it, or even who else does it. But you write it around…(gasp)…ashtrays, and lighters, and chimneys. I’ve seen little shops on Rosecrans, where you. Can buy frying pans with it written. Around the edge.” He had opened a drawer and lifted out a handful of shiny pebbles. “The hippodrome words attract new ghosts. They hang around—trying to figure it out how the end can be the same as the beginning. And then when the fire comes. They get burned up.” He spread the pebbles on the china plate, and then carried it back out through the dark office and right outside to the parking lot.

“Beasties!” he called in a harsh whisper. “Din-din, beasties!” He put the plate down on the pavement. “It’s a mercy thing,” he said again. “They’re better off burned up and gone. If they hang around, they’re likely to get caught by people like Loretta deLarava. That’s Kelley Keith, Uncle Art, what she calls herself now. Caught, and digested, to fatten the parasite’s bloated, pirated personality. And if they don’t get caught by somebody…”

He stepped back, almost into the doorway of the office, and Sullivan joined him in the shadows.

From around behind an upright old car hood on the other side of the yard, a lumpy figure came tottering uncertainly into the glow of the parking-lot light. It was wearing a tan trench coat over its head, with apparently a broad-brimmed hat under that to hold the drapery of the coat out to the sides like a beekeeper’s veil. Its groping hands looked like multi-lobed sweet potatoes.

And from the overgrown chain-link fence on the other side of the lot came a rattling and scuffling, and Sullivan saw more shapes rocking forward out of the darkness.

Bradshaw turned and walked into the dark office, and when Sullivan had followed him inside he closed the door. “They’re shy,” Bradshaw said. “So’s your dad. I’ll be back at the party.”

“Nicky, wait,” said Sullivan quickly. When the fat old man turned his impassive face toward him, he went on almost at random, “Have you got copies of the Alice books? Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass?”

Bradshaw walked around to his desk and opened one of the drawers. After rummaging around, he looked up and called, “Catch,” and tossed a paperback toward Sullivan.

Sullivan did catch it, and he tilted it toward the light from the kitchen; it was both of the Alice books published together. “Thanks,” he said, tucking it into his

hip pocket.

Bradshaw left the building through the kitchen so as not to disturb the timid ghosts at their pebble buffet, and Sullivan sank cautiously into the Naugahyde chair in the middle of the office floor.

“You still got that brass plate from my gravestone?” said the tiny voice of his father.

Sullivan slapped the front of his damp shirt, and felt the heavy angularity still there. “Huh! Yes.”

“Don’t lose it, I’m tethered to it. It’s my night-light. If I stray jar from it, I’ll get lost.”

Sullivan took it out of his pocket, then began unbuttoning his shirt.

“Do you know why I came hack, out of the sea?” his father’s voice said.

“Because Thomas Edison lit up the sky here Monday night.” Sullivan slipped the brass plate down inside the soaked front-side wallet of his scapular and buttoned his shirt up again.

“That’s how I was able to find my way hack. That’s not why.”

Sullivan was shivering, and the cinnamon-and-rot smell of the office seemed to be infused with the smells of suntan lotion and mayonnaise. “Okay,” he whispered to the insect in his ear. “Why?”

“Because I…abandoned you and Elizabeth. I was a white-haired old fool showing off like a high-school Lothario, trying to impress this thirty-three-year-old girl I had married! With three-score and ten, I would have had nine more years with the two of you, seen you reach sixteen. But I had to be Leander, swimming…a Hellespont that turned out to be…well, I only just this week got back to shore.”

Sullivan’s eyes were closed, but tears were running down his cheeks. “Dad, you’re allowed to go swimming—”

“And I hoped that…that it would have been okay, that Kelley would have taken care of you two, and that you’d have grown up to be happy people. I hoped I would come ashore and find you both with…normal lives, you know? Children and houses and pets. Then I could have relaxed and felt that I had not done you any real harm by dying a little sooner than I should have.”

“I’m sorry we weren’t able to show you that.”

Sullivan was thinking of Sukie, drunk and grinning wickedly behind dark sunglasses in a late-night bar, perhaps singing one of her garbled songs; he thought of the way the two of them had watched out for each other through the lonely toster-home years, each always able to finish the other’s interrupted sentence; and he thought of the two of them running away from the sight of their father’s intolerable wallet on the Venice pavement in ‘86, running away separately to live as solitary shamed fugitives. And he imagined Sukie at forty years of age (he hadn’t even seen her since they’d both been thirty-four!) hanging up a telephone after having called Pete to warn him about deLarava’s pursuit—and then putting a gun to her head.

“Kelley Keith was to have been our stepmother,” Sullivan said aimlessly. “And she did…adopt us, in a way, after we got out of college.” He wondered if he meant to hurt his father by saying it; then he knew that he did, and he wondered why.

The gnat was just buzzing wordlessly. Finally it said, “What can I do, what can I do? I’ve come back, and Elizabeth’s killed herself, she’s in the house of spirits with all the other restless dead, idiots jabbering over their pretend drinks and cigarettes. You’re a rootless bum. I gave you kids a mother that was—that was nothing more than a child herself, a greedy, mean, selfish child, and then I left you with her. And it’s wrecked you both. Why did I come back? What the hell can I do?”

Sullivan stood up. “We’ve got to get back to the party.” He sighed. “What you can do…? Sukie and I let you down, even if you don’t see it that way, even if it plain is not that way. Tell us…that you don’t hold it against us; that there are no hard feelings. I bet Sukie will hear you too. Tell us that you…I-love us anyway.”

“I love you, Pete, and not ‘anyway.’ Don’t hold it against me, please, that I left you, that I abandoned you to that woman.”

“We never did, Dad. And we always loved you. We still do.”

The thing in his ear was buzzing indistinctly again, but after a moment it said, “One last favor for your old man?”

Sullivan had crossed to the door, and paused with his hand on the knob. “Yes. Anything.”

“See that I get back in the ocean tomorrow, on Halloween. Say goodbye to me willingly and at peace, and I’ll do the same. That’s the way we’ll do it this time. And then—Lord, boy, you’re forty years old! Stop running, stand your little ground.”

“I will, Dad,” Sullivan said. “Thanks.”

He opened the door. The humped ghosts were crouched around the plate, clumsily picking up pebbles, and they shifted but didn’t flee as Sullivan stepped around them and strode back toward the apartment. “You asked why you came back,” he said, “remember? I think you came back so that we could finally get this done.”

When they got back to the apartment, the pepperoni pizza was gone and everyone had started on the sausage-and-bell-pepper one. Sullivan took a piece of it with good enough grace, and he retrieved his beer.

Bradshaw and Johanna were standing by the window. Elizalde was sitting with Kootie and they were talking amiably; either it was Kootie animating the boy’s body now, or she had got finished yelling at Edison for getting the boy drunk.

“Join you two?” said Sullivan shyly, standing behind her with his beer and his paper plate. His father had flown away when they had reentered the hot apartment; Sullivan had seen the flicker of the gnat looping away toward Bradshaw, but he was no longer jealous.

“The electrical engineer!” said Kootie. Apparently he was still Edison.

Elizalde looked up at Sullivan with a rueful smile. “Sit down, Pete,” she said. “I’m sorry I got into my psych mode there.”

“I asked for it,” he said, folding his legs and sitting next to her. “And your questions were good. I’ve got answers to ‘em, too.”

“I’d like to hear them later.”

“You will, trust me.”

Sullivan guessed that Edison was still a bit drunk; the old man in the boy’s body resumed telling some interrupted story about restoring communications across a fogged, ice-jammed river by driving a locomotive down to the docks and using the steam whistle to toot Morse code across the ice to the far shore, where somebody finally figured out what he was up to and drew up a locomotive of their own so that messages could be sent back and forth across the gap. “Truly wireless,” Edison said, slurring his words. “Even electricless. We’re like the people on the opposite banks, aren’t we? The gulf is torn across all our precious math, and it calls for a very wireless sort of communication to get our emotional accounts settled.” He blinked belligerently at Sullivan. “Isn’t that right, electrical engineer? Or did I drop a decimal place somewhere?”

“No, it sounds valid to me,” Sullivan said. “We’re…lucky, I guess, that you were there with a whistle that could be heard…across the gap.”

AFTER AN hour or so, Kootie’s body curled up asleep again, and Sullivan boxed up the remaining pizza and declared the party over. They all agreed to meet again early in the morning for a walk down to the beach, and then Bradshaw and Johanna plodded away toward the main building, hand in hand, and Elizalde told Sullivan to lock the door, and went into the bathroom to take a shower. When Sullivan leaned the Houdini hands against the closed door, he noticed that the broken finger had been glued back on. Elizalde must have borrowed glue from Johanna.

Sullivan took the Alice book out of his hip pocket and leaned against the kitchen counter to start reading it. When Elizalde came out of the steamy bathroom, wearing her relatively clean jumpsuit, she switched off the living-room chandelier and lay down on the floor near Kootie.

“Will this kitchen light keep you awake?” Sullivan asked quietly.

“An arc-welder wouldn’t keep me awake. Aren’t you…coming to bed?”

He raised the book. “Alice in Wonderland,” he said. “I’ll be along after a while, when I’m done with my homework.”

She stretched on the floor and yawned. “What were your answers to my pushy questions?”

He was tired, and the paperback book was jigging in his trembling fingers. He laid it face-down on the counter. “Here’s one. We are a family, rather than a partnership, if you would like us to be.”

She didn’t say anything, and her face was indistinct in the dark living room. Sullivan got the impression that his answer had surprised her, and pleased her, and frightened her, all at once.

“Let me sleep on that,” she said finally.

He picked up the book again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He stared at the page in front of him, but he wasn’t able to concentrate until she had shifted around to some apparently comfortable position; and her breathing had become regular and slow with sleep.